Houston Filmmakers and Actors

Bohemian New York - The golden age of bohemia. By Inigo Thomas

2005-01-31T16:50:00.000-06:00

Bohemian New York

From: Inigo Thomas
Subject: The Arrival of a Bohemian
Monday, Jan. 31, 2005, at 11:38 AM PT

There's no bohemia in today's New York. Nothing resembles Greenwich Village in its various incarnations from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s, or the art-scene East Village of the late 1970s and 1980s, or Williamsburg in the early 1990s. You can try to find bohemia in far-away Bushwick or Red Hook, both districts of Brooklyn. You can go over the Hudson to the disused warehouses of Jersey City; to Harlem; or even across the harbor to Staten Island, where, in the 1950s, in a house near the ferry terminal, the bohemian critic and Henry James scholar Marius Bewley threw legendary weekendlong parties at which he sometimes dressed as a cardinal, so legendary that I heard about these gatherings across the ocean, in London, 40 years on. But you don't come to find such a place, do you? You come to live the life.

Bohemia doesn't exist as a place. There's no point chasing after it. The bars, saloons, and clubs where bohemians once congregated—the Cedar Tavern on University Place (where the Abstract Expressionist painters met), Cafe Reggio on McDougal Street (a hang-out for the Beat poets, for Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), CBGB on the Bowery (the punk bohemian metropolis of the '70s and early '80s)—aren't bohemian in any sense. Today, the clientele at these places are likely to be students or tourists.

That's not to say there aren't bohemians in the city. There are, but they choose not to live among each other, in a village or a quarter, where they would drive themselves, and those around them, near-mad; bohemians in group invariably do. Christine Stansell's entertaining American Moderns, a history of Greenwich Village bohemia from 1900 to 1920, chronicles the lives of a group of bohemian self-dramatists—Mable Dodge, John Reed, Max Eastman, and many others—who went about making their names often by torturing friends with their arguing and affairs. Whenever bohemians are together, they're likely to be indifferent to the feelings of others. They argue and coerce one another, though their arguing and coercing are sometimes distinguishable from their indifference to other people. Gary Indiana, who lived the East Village bohemia of the 1980s, says that after you've lived in New York for a time you end up liking the people you loathed. I might add that once you start liking those you hated, you're through with bohemianism.

Bohemians aren't necessarily preoccupied by artistic endeavors—or the doing or the making of anything. Not all artists are bohemian, though bohemians invariably live as if their lives were art. They live by love affairs and passions, art by other means, and, when affairs go wrong or passions fade, they nurse the maximum regret—the dramatic falling out, the theatrical breaking-up—with red wine or drugs or wanderings, the serious gloom a necessary counterweight to all the overexuberance.

In my experience, when a bohemian-minded friend arrives in New York, the entire city has tended to assume a more bohemian character: Bohemians are intensely influential, forever altering their immediate surroundings. They're always visitors, whether they live here or not, always unsettled. They're without ordinary troubles. They're out of touch with the life that's considered real. They're more anachronistic than alienated. They're hopeless, yet mysteriously capable of getting by without anyone knowing how they do so. They're people of impossibly modest means who nevertheless live often life more richly or vividly than anyone else. They're irregular in every habit and instinct save one—an irrepressible urge to move, against what appears to be their best interests, whenever they feel too comfortable. They shift from high life to low life and vice versa. One day they convince themselves they are tortured by love; the next they express their conviction that nothing is more enduring. Everything in their lives is animated by intensely felt subjective experience.

With a true bohemian, there's never a chance of assimilation; life is a condition of permanent resistance to belonging (to place, to family, anything resembling a home), though I've always believed they tend to be at their best in New York. It's a good city for émigrés, for those passing through, for the strays and the wayward, the people permanently estranged from home—until New York appears unbearably homely and domesticated, as it can when seen from certain angles.

Many New Yorkers complain that New York is not what it was—back in the 1970s or the 1950s, or in the Gilded Age. But that's because they are, or have become, New Yorkers, and it's a condition of belonging to complain. For those who don't belong, and in an era when border controls are fiercer than ever, when you're forced to belong perhaps more than you'd like, it's the bohemian's achievement (if they have no other) that they don't appear to belong anywhere.

Recently, I went to visit a bohemian friend, who had recently arrived in New York. He was at the Chelsea, the hotel famous less for its comfort—there's no room service, for example—than for those who have stayed in its beds, or who sometimes died en suite. It's where Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen, and from its front door Dylan Thomas walked out into a day and did not return. My friend was staying with friends who'd also recently arrived from London. (I've done the same myself, this staying with friends from out-of-town, in nomadic phases, and there have been several in my New York existence, months when I've not lived anywhere.) He occupied the sofa in the main room of a surprisingly elegant and recently restored set of rooms, so very out of character with rest of this legendarily shabby-chic hotel—the pleasantly seedy corridors, the dust in the lobby, the reassuring disorder at the front desk and the jaded spontaneity of those who work behind it. The artwork in hallways and stairwells, which once looked fresh to some, vibrantly colorful in an '80s way, is now catastrophically inert, speaking to no one, except, maybe, to some of the hotel's lifers—the people who live at the Chelsea, among them a few surviving Chelsea Girls of the Andy Warhol era.

You either like this sort of atmosphere or you don't, and the Chelsea is more expensive than it was—close to 200 bucks a night, including tax. You might prefer the Harlem Flop House, a brownstone with just four rooms on 122nd St., which is popular with a curator from Tate Britain, and close to Harlem jazz clubs such as The Lenox Lounge, Lucy's, Perk's, and Showmans, not far also from the white-stone tomb of Ulysses S. Grant on 123rd Street and Riverside Drive. In the summer, weekly jazz concerts are performed on the plaza in front of the Grant mausoleum, and on warm, clear, humid nights, when the fireflies are sparking, the light fading to the west over the Hudson, few experiences are as haunting and as beautiful as an open air jazz concert performed in front of the memorial to an American president and general who fought against slavery and for the preservation of the Union. There are jazz aficionados, many of them seated in folding jazz chairs, at their jazz picnics; others are dancing; the rest stand staring at the musicians (you can buy a picnic from the nearby Fairway Market on the river and 135th Street). These concerts aren't New York occasions, however, they're an American experience, in which you are thrown into the history of a continent and into the history of those Americans whose music is an expression of their experience of suffering and their triumph over the worst of it.

Inigo Thomas lives in New York, though from time to time he considers living elsewhere. He is a journalist, an editor, and has worked for Slate, George, and the London Review of Books. He has an enthusiasm for voyages of exploration and for 18th-century natural science.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112812/

Jokes sent from my friend Cheryl

2005-01-31T16:30:00.000-06:00

What is the difference between a Harley and a Hoover?
The position of the dirt bag.

Why is divorce so expensive?
Because it's worth it.

Why is Chelsea Clinton so homely?
Because Janet Reno is her real father.

What do you call a smart blonde?
A golden retriever.

What do attorneys use for birth control?
Their personalities.

What's the difference between a girlfriend and wife?
45 lbs.

What's the difference between a boyfriend and husband?
45 minutes.

What's the fastest way to a man's heart?
Through his chest with a sharp knife.

Why do men want to marry virgins?
They can't stand criticism.

Why is it so hard for women to find men that are sensitive, caring, and good-looking?
Because those men already have boyfriends.

What's the difference between a new husband and a new dog?
After a year, the dog is still excited to see you.

What makes men chase women they have no intention of marrying?
The same urge that makes dogs chase cars they have no intention of driving.

A brunette, a blonde, and a redhead are all in third grade.
Who has the biggest boobs?
The blonde, because she's 18.

Why don't bunnies make noise when they have sex?
Because they have cotton balls.

What's the difference between a porcupine and BMW?
A porcupine has the pricks on the outside.

What did the blonde say when she found out she was pregnant?
"Are you sure it's mine?"

What's the difference between Beer Nut s and Deer Nuts?
Beer Nuts are $1, and Deer Nuts are always under a buck.

Why do men find it difficult to make eye contact?
Breasts don't have eyes.

Did you hear about the dyslexic Rabbi?
He walks around saying "Yo."

Why do drivers' education classes in Redneck schools use the car only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?
Because on Tuesday and Thursday, the Sex Ed class uses it.

What's the Cuban National Anthem?
"Row, Row, Row Your Boat"

Where does an Irish family go on vacation?
A different bar.

What would you call it when an Italian has one arm shorter than the other?
A speech impediment.

What does it mean when the flag at the Post Office is flying at half-mast?
They're hiring.

What's the difference between a southern zoo and a northern zoo?
A southern zoo has a description of the animal on the front of the cage along with... "a recipe."

How do you get a sweet little 80-year-old lady to say the F... word?
Get another sweet little 80-year-old lady to yell *BINGO*!

What's the difference between a northern fairytale and a southern fairytale?
A Northern fairytale begins "Once upon a time..."
A southern fairytale begins "Y'all ain't gonna believe this shit..."

Why is there no Disneyland in China?
No one's tall enough to go on

Oklahoma Wine News

2005-01-30T10:37:00.000-06:00

Oklahoma Wine News

Frank Rich: Forget Armor. All You Need Is Love

2005-01-30T08:37:00.000-06:00

January 30, 2005
FRANK RICH
Forget Armor. All You Need Is Love

JAN. 30 is here at last, and the light is at the end of the tunnel, again. By my estimate, Iraq's election day is the fifth time that American troops have been almost on their way home from an about-to-be pacified Iraq. The four other incipient V-I days were the liberation of Baghdad (April 9, 2003), President Bush's declaration that "major combat operations have ended" (May 1, 2003), the arrest of Saddam Hussein (Dec. 14, 2003) and the handover of sovereignty to our puppet of choice, Ayad Allawi (June 28, 2004). And this isn't even counting the two "decisive" battles for our nouveau Tet, Falluja. Iraq is Vietnam on speed - the false endings of that tragic decade re-enacted and compressed in jump cuts, a quagmire retooled for the MTV attention span.

But in at least one way we are not back in Vietnam. Iraq hawks, like Vietnam hawks before them, often take the line that to criticize America's mission in Iraq is to attack the troops. That paradigm just doesn't hold. Americans, including those opposed to the war, love the troops (Lynndie England always excepted). Not even the most unhinged Bush hater is calling our all-volunteer army "baby killers." This time, paradoxically enough, it is often those who claim to love the troops the most - and who have the political power to help alleviate their sacrifice - who turn out to be the troops' false friends.

There was, for instance, according to the Los Angeles Times, "nary a mention" of the Iraq war or "the prices paid by American soldiers and their families" at the lavish Inauguration bash thrown for the grandees of the Christian right by the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition at Washington's Ritz-Carlton. This crowd cares about the troops much the way the Fifth Avenue swells in the 1936 Hollywood classic "My Man Godfrey" cared about the "forgotten men" of the Depression - as fashion ornaments and rhetorical conveniences. In that screwball comedy, a socialite on a scavenger hunt collects a genuine squatter from the shantytown along the East River. "All you have to do is go to the Waldorf-Ritz Hotel with me," she tells her recruit, "and I'll show you to a few people and then I'll send you right back."

In this same vein, television's ceremonial coverage of the Inauguration, much of which resembled the martial pageantry broadcast by state-owned networks in banana republics, made a dutiful show out of the White House's claim that the four-day bacchanal was a salute to the troops. The only commentator to rudely call attention to the disconnect between that fictional pretense and the reality was Judy Bachrach, a writer for Vanity Fair, who dared say on Fox News that the inaugural's military ball and prayer service would not keep troops "safe and warm" in their "flimsy" Humvees in Iraq. She was promptly given the hook. (The riveting three-minute clip, labeled "Fair and Balanced Inauguration," can be found at ifilm.com, where it has seized the "most popular" slot once owned by Jon Stewart's slapdown of Tucker Carlson.)

Alas, there were no Fox News cameras to capture what may have been the week's most surreal "salute" to the troops, the "Heroes Red, White and Blue Inaugural Ball" attended by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The event's celebrity stars included the Fox correspondent Geraldo Rivera, who had been booted from Iraq at the start of the war for compromising "operational security" by telling his viewers the position of the American troops he loves so much. He joked to the crowd that his deployment as an "overpaid" reporter was tantamount to that of an "underpaid hero" in battle. The attendees from Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital, some of whose long-term care must be picked up by private foundations because of government stinginess, responded with "deafening silence," reported Roxanne Roberts of The Washington Post. Ms. Roberts understandably left the party after the night's big act: Nile Rodgers and Chic sang the lyrics "Clap your hands, hoo!" and "Dance to the beat" to "a group of soldiers missing hands and legs."

All the TV time eaten up by the Inaugural froufrou - including "the most boring parade in America," as one network news producer covering it described it to me - would have been better spent broadcasting a true tribute to the American troops in Iraq: a new documentary titled "Gunner Palace." This movie, which opens in theaters March 4, is currently on an advance tour through towns near military bases like Colorado Springs, Colo. (Fort Carson), Killeen, Tex. (Fort Hood) and Columbus, Ga. (Fort Benning). Its directors, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, found that American troops in Iraq often see their lives as real-life approximations of "M*A*S*H," "Platoon," "Full Metal Jacket," and, given the many 21st-century teenagers among the troops, " 'Jackass' Goes to War." But their film's tone is original. This sweet yet utterly unsentimental movie synthesizes the contradictions of a war that is at once Vietnam redux and the un-Vietnam.

Watching "Gunner Palace" - the title refers to the 2-3 Field Artillery's headquarters, the gutted former Uday Hussein palace in Baghdad - you realize the American mission is probably doomed even as you admire the men and women who volunteered to execute it. Here, at last, are the promised scenes of our troops pursuing a humanitarian agenda. Delighted kids follow the soldiers like pied pipers; schools re-open; a fledgling local government council receives a genial and unobtrusive helping American hand. In one moving scene, Specialist James Moats tenderly cradles a tiny baby at an Iraqi orphanage while talking about the birth of his own first son back home: "I've seen pictures but I haven't got to hold him yet." He's not complaining, just explaining. He is living in the moment, offering his heart fully to the vulnerable infant in the crook of his arm.

These scenes are set against others in which the troops, many of them from small towns "that read like an atlas of forgotten America," have to make do with substandard support from their own government. "It'll probably slow down the shrapnel so that it stays in your body instead of going straight through," says one soldier as he tries to find humor in the frail scrap metal with which he must armor his vehicle. Eventually many of his peers, however proud to serve, are daunted by what they see around them: the futility of snuffing out a growing insurgency, the fecklessness of the Iraqi troops they earnestly try to train, the impracticality of bestowing democracy on a populace that often regards Americans either indifferently or as occupiers. When "The Ride of the Valkyries" is heard in "Gunner Palace," it does not signal a rip-roaring campaign as it did in "Apocalypse Now" but, fittingly for this war, a perilous but often fruitless door-to-door search for insurgents in an urban neighborhood.

It says much about the distance between the homefront and these troops that the Motion Picture Association of America this month blithely awarded "Gunner Palace" an "R" rating - which means that it cannot be seen without parental supervision by 16-year-old high-school kids soon to be targeted by military recruiters. (The filmmakers are appealing this verdict.) The reason for the "R" is not violence - there is virtually none on screen - but language, since some of the troops chronicle their Iraq experience by transposing it into occasionally scatological hip-hop verse.

The Bush administration's National Endowment for the Arts, eager to demonstrate that it, too, loves the troops, announced with much self-congratulatory fanfare that it will publish its own anthology of returning veterans' writings about their wartime experience ("Operation Homecoming") - by spring 2006. In "Gunner Palace," you can sample this art right now, unexpurgated - if you're over 16. Here's one freestyle lyric from Sgt. Nick Moncrief, a 24-year-old father of two: "I noticed that my face is aging so quickly/ Cuz I've seen more than your average man in his 50's." True, he does go on to use a four-letter word - to accentuate his evocation of metal ripping through skin and bones. The Traditional Values Coalition would no doubt lobby to shut down the endowment were it to disseminate such filth.

Another of the movie's soldiers, Robert Beatty, a 33-year-old Army lifer with three children back home, wonders whether Americans who "don't have any direct family members in the military" regard the war as anything other than "just entertainment" and guesses that they lost interest once "major combat" had given way to the far deadlier minor combat that followed. A Gallup poll last year showed that most Americans might fall into that group, since two-thirds of those surveyed had no relative, friend or co-worker serving in Iraq. Does that vast unconnected majority understand what's going on there? Sergeant Beatty gives his answer in one of the film's most poignant passages: "If you watch this, you're going to go get your popcorn out of the microwave and talk about what I say. You'll forget me by the end. ..."

The words land so hard because we are already forgetting, or at least turning our backs. In Washington the gears are shifting to all Social Security all the time. A fast growing plurality of the country wants troops withdrawn from Iraq, but being so detached from the war they are unlikely to make a stink about it. The civilian leaders who conceived this adventure are clever at maintaining the false illusion that the end is just around the corner anyway.

They do this by moving the goal posts for "mission accomplished" as frequently as they have changed the rationale for us entering this war in the first place. In the walk-up to the Inauguration, even Iraq's Election Day was quietly downsized in importance so a sixth V-I Day further off in the future could be substituted. Dick Cheney told Don Imus on Inauguration morning that "we can bring our boys home" and that "our mission is complete" once the Iraqis "can defend themselves." What that means, and when exactly that might be is, shall we say, unclear. President Bush and Prime Minister Allawi told the press in unison last September that there were "nearly 100,000 fully trained and equipped" Iraqi security forces ready to carry out that self-defense. Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this month that there are 120,000. Time magazine says this week that the actual figure of fully trained ground soldiers is 14,000, but hey: in patriotism as it's been redefined for this war, loving the troops means never having to say you're sorry - or even having to say the word Iraq in an Inaugural address.

Maureen Dowd: Torture Chicks Gone Wild

2005-01-30T08:35:00.000-06:00

January 30, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Torture Chicks Gone Wild
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

By the time House Republicans were finished with him, Bill Clinton must have thought of a thong as a torture device.

For the Bush administration, it actually is.

A former American Army sergeant who worked as an Arabic interpreter at Gitmo has written a book pulling back the veil on the astounding ways female interrogators used a toxic combination of sex and religion to try to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba. It's not merely disgusting. It's beyond belief.

The Bush administration never worries about anything. But these missionaries and zealous protectors of values should be worried about the American soul. The president never mentions Osama, but he continues to use 9/11 as an excuse for American policies that bend the rules and play to our worst instincts.

"I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case," the former sergeant, Erik R. Saar, 29, told The Associated Press. The A.P. got a manuscript of his book, deemed classified pending a Pentagon review.

What good is it for President Bush to speak respectfully of Islam and claim Iraq is not a religious war if the Pentagon denigrates Islamic law - allowing its female interrogators to try to make Muslim men talk in late-night sessions featuring sexual touching, displays of fake menstrual blood, and parading in miniskirt, tight T-shirt, bra and thong underwear?

It's like a bad porn movie, "The Geneva Monologues." All S and no M.

The A.P. noted that "some Guantánamo prisoners who have been released say they were tormented by 'prostitutes.' "

Mr. Saar writes about what he calls "disturbing" practices during his time in Gitmo from December 2002 to June 2003, including this anecdote related by Paisley Dodds, an A.P. reporter:

A female military interrogator who wanted to turn up the heat on a 21-year-old Saudi detainee who allegedly had taken flying lessons in Arizona before 9/11 removed her uniform top to expose a snug T-shirt. She began belittling the prisoner - who was praying with his eyes closed - as she touched her breasts, rubbed them against the Saudi's back and commented on his apparent erection.

After the prisoner spat in her face, she left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist suggested she tell the prisoner that she was menstruating, touch him, and then shut off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash.

"The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength," Mr. Saar recounted, adding: "She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the detainee. As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand. She said, 'Who sent you to Arizona?' He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred. She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward," breaking out of an ankle shackle.

"He began to cry like a baby," the author wrote, adding that the interrogator's parting shot was: "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."

A female civilian contractor kept her "uniform" - a thong and miniskirt - on the back of the door of an interrogation room, the author says.

Who are these women? Who allows this to happen? Why don't the officers who allow it get into trouble? Why do Rummy and Paul Wolfowitz still have their jobs?

The military did not deny the specifics, but said the prisoners were treated "humanely" and in a way consistent "with legal obligations prohibiting torture." However the Bush White House is redefining torture these days, the point is this: Such behavior degrades the women who are doing it, the men they are doing it to, and the country they are doing it for.

There's nothing wrong with trying to squeeze information out of detainees. But isn't it simply more effective to throw them in isolation and try to build some sort of relationship?

I doubt that the thong tease works as well on inmates at Gitmo as it did on Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.

Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98

2005-01-29T16:19:00.000-06:00

Arnold Newman/Liasion – Getty Images
Philip Johnson with his Glass House in July, 1949 in New Canaan, Conn.

January 27, 2005
Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98; Architecture's Restless Intellect
By PAUL GOLDBERGER

Philip Johnson, at once the elder statesman and the enfant terrible of American architecture, died yesterday at the compound surrounding the Glass House, the celebrated residence he built for himself in New Canaan, Conn. He was 98.

His death was disclosed by David Whitney, his companion of 45 years.

Often considered the dean of American architects, Mr. Johnson was known less for his individual buildings than for the sheer force of his presence on the architectural scene, which he served as a combination godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator and cheerleader. His 90th birthday, in July 1996, was marked by symposiums, lectures, an outpouring of essays in his honor and back-to-back dinners at two venerable New York institutions he had played a major role in creating: the Museum of Modern Art, whose department of architecture and design he joined in 1930, and the Four Seasons restaurant, which he designed as part of the Seagram Building in 1958.

His long career was a study in contradictions. He first became famous as an impassioned advocate of Modern architecture, and his early writings helped establish the reputation of European Modernists like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in this country. He began his architectural career as Mies's leading acolyte. But what fascinated him most was the idea of the new, and once he had helped establish Modernist architecture in the United States, he moved on, experimenting with decorative Classicism, embracing the reuse of historical elements that would become known as postmodernism, and finally returning again to Modernism, yet one with an expressive and highly emotional energy.

Mr. Johnson's own architecture received mixed reviews and often startled the public and his fellow architects. Because of his frequent changes of style, he was often accused of pandering to fashion and of designing buildings that were facile and shallow. Yet he created several designs, including the Glass House, the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, and the pre-Columbian gallery at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington that are widely considered among the architectural masterworks of the 20th century. And for his entire career, his engagement with architectural theory and ideas was as deep as that of any scholar.

He was the first winner of the Pritzker Prize, the $100,000 award established in 1979 by the Pritzker family of Chicago to honor an architect of international stature. In 1978, he won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest award the American profession bestows on any of its members.

As an architect, he made his mark arguing the importance of the aesthetic side of architecture and claimed that he had no interest in buildings except as works of art. Yet he was so eager to build that he willingly took commissions from real estate developers who refused to meet his aesthetic standards. He liked to refer to himself, with only some irony, as a whore. And in the 1930's, this man who believed that art ranked above all else took a bizarre and, he later conceded, deeply mistaken detour into right-wing politics, suspending his career to work on behalf of Gov. Huey P. Long of Louisiana and later the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, and expressing more than passing admiration for Hitler.

Mr. Johnson's foray into fascism was over by the time the United States entered World War II, and in the mid-1950's he sought to publicly atone to Jews by designing a synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y., for no fee. But to the end of his life the contradictions continued. With his dignified bearing and elegant, tailored suits, he looked every bit the part of a distinguished, genteel aristocrat, but he played the celebrity culture of the 1980's and 90's as successfully as a rock star. To the public, he was far and away the best-known living architect, and his crisply outlined, round face, marked by heavy, round black spectacles of his own design, was a common sight on television programs and magazine covers.

Except for his brief involvement in right-wing politics, all of his careers revolved around architecture. He began his professional life as a writer, historian and curator and did not enter architecture school until he was 35. Even when he became one of the nation's most eminent practicing architects, he continued to be a major patron of institutions and of younger architects, whose work he followed with avid interest.

He began his career as an ardent champion of Modernism, but unlike many of the movement's early proselytizers, he changed with the times, and his own work showed a major movement away from beginnings that were heavily influenced by Mies. In the late 1950's, just after he had collaborated with Mies on the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, he introduced elements of classical architecture into his buildings, beginning a long quest to find ways of connecting contemporary architecture to historical form. It was a quest that would begin with highly abstracted versions of Classicism in the 1960's and culminate in a much more literal use of the architectural forms of the past in his revivalist skyscrapers of the 1980's.

That phase of Mr. Johnson's career included such well-known monuments as the classically detailed pink-granite AT&T Building (now the Sony building) on Madison Avenue, which he completed in 1984 with John Burgee, then his partner; the Republic Bank tower (now NCNB Center) in Houston, which used elements of Flemish Renaissance architecture; the Transco Tower (now the Williams Tower) in Houston, which recapitulated the setback forms of a romantic 1920's tower in glass, perhaps his finest skyscraper; and the PPG Place in Pittsburgh, a reflective glass tower whose Gothic form copied the shape of the tower of the Houses of Parliament in London.

Focusing on Historical Form

Institutional clients also received their share of Mr. Johnson's fixation with historical form: he designed a Romanesque structure in brick for the Cleveland Play House and a Classical building based on the designs of the French visionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée for the architecture school of the University of Houston.

In the late 1980's Mr. Johnson's restless mind, having played a major role in shifting American architecture toward postmodernism, with its reuse of traditional elements, moved on yet again. Fascinated by the intense, highly abstract work of a group of younger Modernist architects who were to become known as the deconstructivists, Mr. Johnson began to incorporate elements of their architecture into his own work.

He was particularly entranced with the buildings of the Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, whose complex, seemingly irrational forms would appear to be the antithesis of the cool, rational, ordered architectural world of Mr. Johnson's first mentor, Mies, and much of his late work reflected Mr. Gehry's influence.

Mr. Johnson, an urbane, elegant figure, was perhaps the most socially prominent New York architect since Stanford White. Born to wealth, he and Mr. Whitney, a curator and art dealer, lived well, for many years in a town house on East 52nd Street that Mr. Johnson had originally designed as a guest house for John D. Rockefeller 3d, then in an elaborately decorated apartment in Museum Tower above the Museum of Modern Art and always on weekends in the famous Glass House compound.

Mr. Johnson had lunch daily amid other prominent and powerful New Yorkers at a special table in the corner of the Grill Room of the Four Seasons. His guest was likely to be a young architect in whose work he had taken an interest, and for years his table functioned as a kind of miniature architectural salon.

In the evenings, he was frequently seen at exclusive social events, for years by himself and in the last decade, as he felt greater ease in making his relationship with Mr. Whitney public, with his companion. He was among the few architects whose comings and goings were considered worthy of notice in the gossip columns.

He had been an active art collector since the days when, as a student traveling in Germany, he bought a pair of Paul Klees from the artist. Eventually he came to be a collector of contemporary art: advised by Mr. Whitney, he filled his walls with paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns when they were just gaining public attention, and he amassed one of the most complete collections of paintings by Frank Stella in private hands.

Mr. Johnson not only lived and ate in places of his own design, he also worked in them. For many years his office was in the Seagram Building. Mr. Johnson practiced alone there for some years, then collaborated with the architect Richard Foster, for a time, and in 1967 formed a partnership with John Burgee.

It was this partnership that transformed Mr. Johnson from a scholar-architect designing small to medium-size institutional buildings for well-to-do clients into a major force in commercial architecture. Mr. Burgee's arrival coincided with the firm's movement toward a number of major, widely acclaimed skyscraper projects, including the IDS Center in Minneapolis and Pennzoil Place in Houston. Mr. Johnson's leanings were always toward the aesthetic issues in design, and in Mr. Burgee he had a partner who could serve not only as a colleague in design but also as an executive overseeing the kind of large architectural office required to produce major skyscrapers.

As if to mark Mr. Burgee's role, the Johnson-Burgee firm moved in 1986 into the elliptical skyscraper at 885 Third Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets. Popularly known as the Lipstick Building, it had been designed by the partners together. But the partnership was not to last long beyond the move: Mr. Burgee, eager to occupy center stage, negotiated a more limited role for Mr. Johnson and in 1991 exercised the prerogative he had as the firm's chief executive and eased Mr. Johnson out altogether.

It proved an unwise decision: the firm, crippled by an arbitration decision unrelated to Mr. Johnson, soon went into bankruptcy, all but ending Mr. Burgee's career. Mr. Johnson, who had severed ties to his former firm, had no liability and went on to rent a smaller space in the Lipstick Building, gleefully hanging out his shingle in his mid-80's and declaring himself in business as a solo practitioner. Before long, he had several commissions, including a cathedral in Dallas, and his career had recharged itself.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born on July 8, 1906, in Cleveland, the son of Homer H. Johnson, a well-to-do lawyer, and Louise Pope Johnson. Supported by a fortune that consisted largely of the Aluminum Company of America stock given him by his father, Mr. Johnson went to Harvard to study Greek, but became excited by architecture and spent the years immediately after his graduation in 1927 touring Europe and looking at the early buildings of the developing Modern architecture movement.

He teamed up with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, at that time the movement's chief academic partisan in the United States, and their travels together resulted in their book "The International Style," published in 1932 and now a classic. "We have an architecture still," is how Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hitchcock concluded the book, which played a major role in introducing Americans to the work of European Modernists like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier, then barely known here.

In 1930, Mr. Johnson joined the architecture department at a new institution in New York, the Museum of Modern Art. He moved the museum quickly to the forefront of the architectural avant-garde, sponsoring exhibitions on contemporary themes and arranging for visits by Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies, for whom he also negotiated his first American commission.

Mr. Johnson left the museum in 1936 to pursue his political agenda, dividing his time among Berlin, Louisiana and his family's home in Ohio. By the summer of 1940, his infatuation with right-wing politics had faded, although as Franz Schulze, his biographer, wrote in 1994, it was never clear whether he withdrew because he had changed his mind or because he had failed to achieve political success. "In politics he proved to be a model of futility," Mr. Schulze wrote in "Philip Johnson: Life and Work. "He was never much of a political threat to anyone, still less an effective doer of either political good or political evil."

In 1941, at 35, Mr. Johnson turned once and for all to the field that would occupy him for the rest of his life and enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design to begin the process of becoming an architect.

At Harvard, Mr. Johnson did what few students, even those of great means, have been able to do: he actually built the project he designed as a thesis. It was a house in the style of Mies, its lot surrounded by a wall that merges into the structure, and it still stands at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, Mass.

After wartime service in the United States Army - the F.B.I. had investigated Mr. Johnson for his fascist leanings, but the government decided he was sufficiently repentant to wear the uniform (he never saw combat) - he returned in 1946 to the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time he began to slowly build up an architectural practice of his own, combining it with his career as a writer and curator.

He designed a small, boxy house, also highly influenced by Mies, for a client in Sagaponack, Long Island, in 1946, but his first significant building, and still perhaps his most famous, was not for another client at all but, like the Cambridge house, for his own use: it was the Glass House in New Canaan, completed in 1949 with its counterpoint, a brick guest house.

The serene Glass House, a 56-foot-by-32-foot rectangle, is generally considered one of the 20th century's greatest residential structures. Like all of Mr. Johnson's early work, it was inspired by Mies, but its pure symmetry, dark colors and closeness to the earth marked it as a personal statement: calm and ordered rather than sleek and brittle.

A Home Becomes a Museum

Over the years, Mr. Johnson added to the Glass House property, turning it into a compound that became a veritable museum of his architecture, with buildings representing each phase of his career. A small, elegant white-columned pavilion by the lake was built in 1963; an art gallery, an underground building set into a hill, with pictures from Mr. Johnson's extensive collection of contemporary art set on movable panels, in 1965; the sculpture gallery of 1970, a sharply defined, irregular white structure covered with a greenhouselike glass roof; a library of stucco with a rounded tower that from a distance looks like a miniature castle (1980); a concrete-block tower, as much a piece of sculpture as a building, dedicated to his lifelong friend Lincoln Kirstein, the writer and New York City Ballet co-founder (1985); a "ghost house" of chain-link fence, honoring Mr. Gehry, who often used this material (1985); and finally, what Mr. Johnson called "Da Monsta," an irregularly shaped building of deep red with sharply curving walls, finished in 1995.

The "Monsta" -he could not quite bring himself to call one of his buildings a monster, but said its shape resembled it - is set at the gate of the estate and was intended to serve as a visitors center once the public was admitted to the property after his death. The compound was willed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which plans to run it as a museum.

In addition to Mr. Whitney, Mr. Johnson is survived by a sister, Jeannette Dempsey, now 102, of Cleveland.

After the Glass House was completed in 1949, Mr. Johnson received other residential commissions, including a number of houses in New Canaan. His first work on a very large scale, however, was the Seagram Building, designed with Mies. The deep bronze Seagram is considered by many critics to be the finest postwar skyscraper in New York.

But by then, Mr. Johnson was growing impatient with the limitations of the strict, austere Miesian vocabulary. He began to explore a more decorative sort of neo-Classicism, leading to designs like the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth (1961), the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center (1964) and the Bobst Library at New York University, designed in 1965 but not completed until 1973. His work in that period led the architectural historian Vincent Scully to refer to him as "admirably lucid, unsentimental and abstract, with the most ruthlessly aristocratic, highly studied taste of anyone practicing in America today."

"All that a nervous sensibility, lively intelligence and a stored mind can do, he does," Mr. Scully said.

Mr. Johnson's art collecting brought him a nearly continuous stream of commissions to design museums, and his ties to the Museum of Modern Art brought him the request to design the museum's 1951 and 1964 expansions beyond its original 1939 building, including the sculpture garden. He also designed the original Asia House gallery on East 64th Street, now the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as museums in Fort Worth; Utica, N.Y.; Lincoln, Neb.; and Corpus Christi, Tex.

Despite his record as a museum designer and his long association with the Modern, the museum's board, of which Mr. Johnson was a member, decided in 1978 to hire a different architect to design its new west wing. The job went to Cesar Pelli, and Mr. Johnson was deeply hurt.

For some time, relations cooled between him and the museum he had supported nearly since its founding, but eventually they resumed, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Whitney moved into the apartment tower above the museum designed by Mr. Pelli. In 1984, as a tribute to Mr. Johnson as its founding curator, the museum's department of architecture and design named its exhibition space the Philip Johnson Gallery. And the Modern observed Mr. Johnson's 90th birthday with a pair of exhibitions: one of notable works of art that the architect had donated to the museum, and another of works given by architects in Mr. Johnson's honor. More recently, the architect Yoshio Taniguchi set to work on his design for the Modern's latest expansion, Mr. Johnson met occasionally with him to chat about the challenges of blending old and new.

The beginnings of his late career as a major commercial architect were not in New York, however, but in Minneapolis, through an immense project in 1972 for Investors Diversified Services, a financial conglomerate now part of American Express. A square-block complex containing a roughly octagonally shaped, 51-story glass tower, hotel and retail wing placed around a central glass-covered court, the design blended Mr. Johnson's interest in angular forms with a sensitive urbanism. It quickly became a focal point for downtown Minneapolis and was the first of a generation of what might be called social skyscrapers: towers that did not merely house office workers but also contained myriad public spaces.

Among the many observers impressed by the tower was Gerald D. Hines of Houston, a real estate developer who had begun his career as a builder of warehouses but who by the early 1970's had sought to make a mark with much larger buildings by prominent architects. Mr. Hines hired Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee to design Pennzoil Place, a twin-towered complex of glass in downtown Houston that was completed in 1976. One of the most widely known skyscrapers in the country, Pennzoil Place consists of two trapezoidal towers placed so as to leave two triangular areas open on the site. These areas were covered with steel and glass trusses to create greenhouselike lobbies; as a further formal gesture, each tower was given a slanted roof for the top seven floors.

Pennzoil Place would prove widely influential, but five years later Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee moved away from it with the design for one of the most startling skyscrapers of the last generation, the AT&T headquarters in New York, the so-called "Chippendale skyscraper" with a split pediment resembling an antique highboy.

During the 1980's Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee also designed major skyscrapers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas, many for Mr. Hines. Most of them, following the lead of the AT&T. Building, were lavishly finished in granite and marble and imitated some aspect of architecture of the past.

Mr. Johnson also designed the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., and the Museum of Television and Radio on West 52nd Street in New York. With Mr. Burgee, he produced plans through the 1980's for office towers for Times Square. Widely criticized, they were never built. After the dissolution of his partnership with Mr. Burgee, he formed one with Alan Ritchie, a longtime associate, and produce several works for Donald J. Trump, including the glass tower at 1 Central Park West and projects for the Riverside South residential development; and plans for a cathedral for a gay congregation in Dallas. Mr. Johnson continued to go to work at Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects in the Seagram Building as recently as last year.

Though he gave up formal scholarship when he became an architect, he continued to write and lecture frequently. His constant theme, unchanged through all his stylistic variations, was his belief in the need to view architecture as an art, separating him from the socially minded early Modernists whose cause he once championed so ardently.

In a famous lecture in 1954 at Harvard titled "The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture," he said, "Merely that a building works is not sufficient." Later, in an oft-quoted remark, he said, "I would rather sleep in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms."

Years later, Mr. Johnson told an audience: "We still have a monumental architecture. To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it."

But he ended by arguing: "Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

"Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in."

A Young Taipei Finds Its Groove

2005-01-29T16:10:00.000-06:00

Sam Yeh for The New York Times
Omni, a furniture shop owned by the pop singer Jay Chou.

Sam Yeh for The New York Times
Mint, the latest club by the interior designer Mark Lintott, is in the 101-story Taipei 101 building.

January 23, 2005
A Young Taipei Finds Its Groove
By ANDREW YANG

A DECADE ago in Taipei, finding a decent cup of coffee would have proved a challenge. Now, there are all-night dance clubs and boutique hotels, MTV Taiwan and espresso bars. Change is a constant in the city, the capital of Taiwan, which has been transformed significantly along with its cosmopolitan counterparts Hong Kong and Singapore. As a whole generation emerges - nearly a quarter of the electorate of Taiwan is under 30 - the culture is as much about playing hard as working hard.

"When I first came here, people just lived to work, and now it seems to be switching around," said Mark Lintott, 45, a Taipei-based British interior designer who arrived in the city 15 years ago. "Now, people are much more willing to spend money outside out of profit creation, and they seem to be genuinely having a good time."

Since 1989, when the government eased travel restrictions, particularly to mainland China (nonstop charter flights over the Chinese New Year's holiday, the first nonstops since 1949, were announced last week), Taipei has benefited from a steady stream of foreign visitors. A city where Mandarin Chinese is primarily spoken - as it is in Beijing and Shanghai - Taipei remains one of the most bustling and quintessentially Asian cities in the region.

Night markets can be found throughout the city, with vendors of discount clothes and other goods next to food carts selling such favorites as oyster noodles and stinky tofu, a fermented bean curd. Traditional cultural treasures like the serene Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Park and the National Palace Museum, north of the city, are some of the must-see landmarks. And with an emerging culture catering to young people, the city is becoming a cool place to visit.

About 2.5 million of Taiwan's 22 million residents live in Taipei. Its main axis is Civil Boulevard, which runs east-west and acts as a central artery to the city's major malls and shopping centers.

From more progressive shopping centers on the west side like Idée and Mitsukoshi to such megamalls as the Breeze Center and the Core Pacific on the east side, department stores are thriving as a result of a younger, more self-conscious generation of consumers, said the 29-year-old designer Robyn Hung.

"There are more TV channels reporting fashion trends from Paris, Milan and New York, and information gets around quicker," said Ms. Hung, who has a boutique on the second floor of Idée that primarily sells women's clothes by younger independent designers. She started her line four years ago after graduating from the London College of Fashion.

One of the largest symbols of shopping and consumption in Taipei is the Core Pacific Center. Opened in 2001, it is a 12-story sphere, with a building fitted around it. Designed by the Los Angeles-based Jon Jerde, who also designed the Bellagio in Las Vegas, it is home to brands like Hugo Boss, the Mira department store and, on the top floor, a nightclub called Plush.

As a response to the recent wave of large-scale shopping malls, the city has sprouted its first district primarily catering to 20-somethings. Nestled in a series of side streets and alleyways between Civil Boulevard to the north, Renai Road to the south and Dunhua South Road and Guangfu South Road to the west and east, this district has developed in the last few years. It is still a mostly residential neighborhood, but businesses have sprung up on the ground floors of apartment buildings and other structures that were not typically used as shops.

Walking around, visitors will come across Omni, a furniture store that carries a stock of midcentury and contemporary furniture by Verner Panton and Eero Saarinen. Billed as an "antique" store, it has an expansive glass facade that showcases its stock of modern and vintage chairs, T-shirts and travel accessories. Owned by the pop singer Jay Chou, Omni has become a popular tourist attraction for visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of the singer.

"Before, the cool shops would be scattered around different neighborhoods, and now all the big department stores are on the main road," said Nancy Chen, 29, a graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York, who recently set up her graphic design office, Edible Sound Project, in an apartment building in this area. "But now, as the street is becoming overly commercialized, shops are developing as individual boutiques in the lanes and alleys."

Within this neighborhood, places to eat include the China Bar, Tea and DJ Restaurant, 1F, No. 24 Lane 205, Chung-siao East Road, Section 4, (886-2) 2772-7622, which serves an array of Chinese and other Asian food and where dishes like pork ribs and chicken curry are not out of the ordinary. The interior of China Bar resembles a store that exclusively sells used 1960's furniture, but the most notable feature is the large prints of Kama Sutra pages wallpapered to the bathroom walls. Dinner for two, about $25 (prices at 33 Taiwan dollars to the U.S. dollar).

For a more casual setting, the Zaka coffeehouse, 1F, No. 37, Lane 177, Section 1, Dunhua South Road, (886-2) 2773-7009, is a popular local hangout that offers free Wi-Fi connections.

When you get toward the southern end near Anho Road, a cluster of hip bars and lounges are on a leafy and seemingly quiet road that diagonally crosses the city grid. One of the most notorious bars is Carnegie's, a popular hangout for foreigners, where women can frequently be found dancing on tabletops on rowdy weekend nights.

This area is primarily known for its more upscale lounges, popular with large groups. For a more laid-back atmosphere, try Champagne 2, which is known for its Champagne infused with litchi flavor. The atmosphere there is typical of many of the lounges on this street - the interiors are often tasteful and not outlandish, the clientele tends to be quite young, and martini cocktails are the standard.

The trend toward more modern and sleek interiors has also spread to the hotels in Taipei. In the past, the 14-story Grand Hotel was the most popular, and resembled a large Buddhist temple with a huge pitched roof. Now, the emphasis is on cool, sumptuous interiors as well as more personalized service.

Two branches of the warm and cozy Les Suites hotels recently opened, one at 12 Ching Cheng Street, (886-2) 8712-7589, fax (886-2) 8712-7699, near Sung Shan Airport to the north, and another south of the city at 135 Da-An Road, Section 1 (886-2) 8773-3668, fax (886-2) 8773-3788; www.suitetpe.com for both. Doubles at both from about $130.

Le Petit Sherwood, 370 Tun Hwa South Road, Section 1, (886-2) 2754-1166, fax (886-2) 2754 3399, is also in a southern part of the city. Featuring funky interiors, it opened in 2000 as one of the first boutique hotels in the city. Doubles start at about $200.

In Taipei, there is a greater expectation of clubs, bars and lounges that look as trendy as those in New York or London. "The night life in the city has moved from an immature adolescence to now, where it's just catching up a bit to everybody else," said Mr. Lintott, who designed Opium Den, one of the first trendy lounges in Taipei, in 1996. He has watched the nightclubs become increasingly outlandish with each project.

His latest club, Mint, 45 Shifu Road, Section 4, (886-2) 8101-8662, is in the lower level of the world's tallest building, Taipei 101 (101 stories, and 1,667 feet, tall). Although the silvery structure is set for occupation this spring, the mall on the ground floor has been in operation for nearly a year.

Mint, whose name refers to its monetary connotation, includes a V.I.P. room, a modular mahogany wall full of wines, floating L.E.D. displays behind the bar, a translucent, glowing dance floor and custom-designed pieces of acrylic furniture. On a Friday night last fall, throngs of clubgoers occupied the dance floor. The dressy crowd was mostly Asian, but there were a good number of Americans and Europeans in their 20's scattered about.

Entry to the clubs, which can cost as much as $30, can be competitive. To get in, people need the proper connections and dress, and the social scene seems to lean heavily toward English-speaking Chinese, local celebrities and businessmen.

Competition has indeed heated up in the city, with large-scale supper clubs such as Luxy and the Ministry of Sound - one of Asia's largest clubs, with three floors and capacity for 2,500 - competing heavily for clubgoers and big-name D.J.'s. Many of these clubs are set up like large raves, and visitors can expect big crowds of sweaty dancers pulsating hip to hip. Techno music, as well as hip-hop, is the norm.

"People in Taipei, especially the younger ones, are getting more and more sociable," said Ms. Hung, the fashion designer. "We're more aware of not just Taiwan, but the whole world as well."

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/travel/23taipei.html

The Firefox Explosion

2005-01-29T16:06:00.000-06:00

The Firefox Explosion
It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular. The hot new browser called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your back, Bill Gates.)
By Josh McHughPage 1 of 3 next »

For Rob Davis, the final straw came during a beautiful weekend last summer, which he spent holed up in his Minneapolis apartment killing a zombie. The week before, a malicious software program had invaded Davis' PC through his browser, Internet Explorer, using a technique called the DSO exploit. His computer had been repurposed as a "zombie box" - its CPU and bandwidth co-opted to pump reams of spam onto the Internet. Furious, Davis dropped out of a planned Lake Superior camping trip to instead back up his computer and reformat his crippled hard drive. Then he vowed never to open IE again.

Lucky for Davis, a new browser had just appeared on the scene - Firefox, a fast, simple, and secure piece of software that was winning acclaim from others who also had grown frustrated with Internet Explorer. A programmer friend told Davis about Firefox. He didn't know that the browser was an open source project and a descendant of Netscape Navigator now poised to avenge Netscape's defeat at the hands of Microsoft. He just knew that he didn't want to waste another weekend cursing at his machine. So Davis drove to the friend's house and copied Firefox onto his battered laptop. He hasn't had a problem since - and now he's telling anybody who will listen about Firefox's virtues. "I'm no anti-Microsoft zealot, but it's unconscionable that they make 98 percent of the operating systems in the world and they let things like this happen to people," says Davis, a PR man by day who liked Firefox so much that he initiated a fundraising campaign to help promote the browser. "There's a lot of pain out there."

Firefox couldn't have arrived at a better time for people like Davis - or at a worse time for Microsoft. Ever since Internet Explorer toppled Netscape in 1998, browser innovation has been more or less limited to pop-up ads, spyware, and viruses. Over the past six years, IE has become a third world bus depot, the gathering point for a crush of hawkers, con artists, and pickpockets. The recent outbreak of malware - from the spyware on Davis' machine to the .ject Trojan, which uses a bug in IE to snatch sensitive data from an infected PC - has prompted early adopters to look for an alternate Web browser. Even in beta, Firefox's clean, intuitive interface, quick page-loading, and ability to elude intruders elicited a thunderous response. In the month following its official November launch, more than 10 million people downloaded Firefox, taking the first noticeable bite out of IE's market share since the browser wars of the mid-'90s.

Like most open source software, Firefox is forever a work in progress, the product of continual tweaking by thousands of programmers all over the world. But two people in particular are most responsible for the browser's success: Blake Ross, an angular, hyperkinetic 19-year-old Stanford sophomore with spiky black hair, and Ben Goodger, a stout, soft-spoken 24-year-old New Zealander. At age 14, Ross, logging on to his family's America Online account, started fixing bugs for the Mozilla Group, a cadre of programmers responsible for maintaining the source code of Netscape's browsers. Ross quickly became disenchanted with Netscape's feature creep and in 2002 brashly decided to splinter off and develop a pared-down, fast, easy-to-use browser. Goodger, who plays the David Filo or Larry Page to Ross' frontman, took the reins when Ross became a full-time college student in 2003. Goodger pulled the project's loose ends together and whipped the browser into shape for the release of Firefox 1.0 late last year.

What makes Firefox different from other open source projects is its consumer appeal. Until now, the open source community has been very good at creating useful software but lousy at finding nontechnical users. By liberating Firefox from the "by geeks, for geeks" ethos, Ross and Goodger have moved open source out of server rooms and onto Microsoft's turf: the desktop. Borrowing from the Net-based grassroots techniques of the recent political season, the Firefox inner circle has turned satisfied users into foot soldiers and missionaries. How's this for a marketer's dream: In the weeks following the debut, Firefox contributors and fans threw their own launch parties in 392 cities around the world.

"People thought the browser wars were over," Ross says, relishing the giant-killer role. "But now there's a widespread perception that IE is not secure - and here we are." What started out as one schoolboy's exercise in minimalism, with a nod to Google's back-to-basics obsession, has tapped into a growing desire for simplicity among ordinary computer users. "The success of this thing has totally surprised us," Goodger adds. "Firefox has really touched a nerve."

Firefox the browser is an impressive piece of software. It's easy to use, easy on the eyes, and safer than IE - partly because it's too new to have amassed a following of evil hackers. Firefox the phenomenon is something much bigger. It's a combination of innovations in engineering, developer politics, and consumer marketing.

Computer users embraced the browser almost immediately. Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines, a weblog-aggregation service, reports that Firefox rocketed from 5 percent of Bloglines' server traffic to 20 percent in the month after the beta version was released. Software developers are on board, too - Ross and Goodger made sure that writing Firefox add-ons would be simple. Coders have created more than 175 extensions that perform specific, sometimes delightful functions, like incorporating an iTunes controller in the browser's border or a three-day weather forecast that pulls data from Weather.com and displays sun, cloud, and rain icons in the Firefox status bar. Two popular extensions make it easier to subscribe to RSS feeds through Bloglines. "Anyone can write programs that work with this browser," Fletcher says. "I look at the fanfare and excitement that Firefox is causing - even my parents are using it and loving it." Based on what his server logs are telling him, Fletcher predicts that Firefox will represent close to 50 percent of Bloglines' traffic by the time Longhorn, Microsoft's long-awaited browserless operating system, is ready in 2006. At BoingBoing, nearly half of all visitors are already using Mozilla browsers.

Whatever success Firefox sees, it will come from social engineering as much as software engineering. Firefox has been the product of a massive get-out-the-vote effort. While Goodger was refining Firefox code, Ross started Spread Firefox, a community site that hosts Firefox blogs and gives points to a volunteer army of operatives for converting the masses. SpreadFirefox.com functions as a clearinghouse for marketing and recruiting strategies, a coordination center for coders, banner designers, and evangelists. The site was built on Civic Space, software developed by Carnegie Mellon grad Chris Messina for the Howard Dean online campaign. "Software development is a political process," says Messina.

Spread Firefox has served as the engine of an impressive fundraising campaign put together by zombie victim Rob Davis. In July, Davis, an account director with PR firm Haberman & Associates, contacted Ross and pitched an idea: Raise enough money from Firefox fans to run an ad in The New York Times. Over 10 days in October, more than 10,000 donors visited the Spread Firefox site and kicked in an average of $25 apiece, enough to pay for a two-page spread. The Firefox ad ran in the Times on December 16, featuring the name of every donor in barely readable, 4.5-point type, prompting another deluge of downloads.

OK, time for a reality check. Explorer is still the choice of 90 percent of Internet users. As user-friendly as Firefox may be, most of its current users are early-adopter types, bloggers, people with an ideological aversion to Microsoft. Almost every PC sold since September includes IE and the latest browser security patches. The number of Firefox downloads will surely slow, maybe even plateau, when the supply of easy converts runs dry.

But Firefox doesn't have to overtake IE to cause havoc in Redmond. Microsoft had essentially given up on Internet Explorer development - focusing instead on its next-gen OS, Longhorn. With Longhorn, the company hopes to make the stand-alone browser obsolete by incorporating Web browsing into the desktop. As part of the transition, Microsoft has created the developer language XAML, an heir to HTML. Until a few months ago, it looked like the shift to Longhorn would give Microsoft control of the Web's de facto standards. Now, with Microsoft's share in the browser market slipping - IE has lost 5 percent in the past six months, almost all of it to Firefox - Web designers can't afford to ignore the standards of Tim Berners-Lee's W3C, which Mozilla has hewed to but which Microsoft has regarded as strictly optional. Which means Bill Gates' troops must now turn back to IE and battle the ghost of Netscape.

Officially, Microsoft addresses Firefox with a sharp-toothed smile and open arms. "Any time someone creates a new piece of software for the Windows platform, it's great," says Gary Schare, director of product management for Windows. "Occasionally, a new application competes with one of ours." In recent interviews, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has responded to questions about Firefox evasively, claiming that Microsoft hasn't abandoned browser development and that the XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft's latest security patch, was actually a major browser release. The day that the Firefox ad ran in the Times, Microsoft made a less-splashy announcement of its own - it acquired anti-spyware software maker Giant. Microsoft insists it's not changing its tack because of Firefox, but watch for the company to move more quickly to release browser updates and security patches - and to add a dash of marketing to sweeten the mix.

This browser war is different from the first go-round, when Internet Explorer came from nowhere to crush the dominant Netscape Navigator. Unlike in the past decade, Microsoft can't fight off Firefox by lowballing; both browsers are free. More important, Microsoft isn't battling a startup in round two - it's battling thousands of open source programmers and several non-Microsoft titans that have rallied around Firefox. Sun Microsystems employs a dozen Firefox coders in Beijing. IBM has two dozen coders on the case in Austin, Texas. Google has hosted a Mozilla developer conference, not to mention Firefox's default start page, and rumors of a "gbrowser," a Google-branded browser built on top of Firefox, continue to swirl.

Such teamwork is particularly effective when it comes to addressing pressing concerns, like security. It took months for Redmond to fix the hole in IE exploited by the .ject Trojan last June. A few weeks later, a programmer reported a Firefox bug that allowed a malicious Web site to spy on the information users entered into online forms. In less than 36 hours, teams of open source programmers rallied to create a patch, which was then incorporated into the current release of Firefox and also made available as an easily added extension.

It's launch day for Firefox 1.0 at the Silicon Valley offices of the Mozilla Foundation, and the Web servers are cranking. By nightfall, people around the world will download the open source browser more than a million times - swiftly earning Firefox a greater share of the browser market than anything not called Internet Explorer. Grinning engineers move from desk to desk, reading congratulatory emails aloud, trading high-fives, laughing, and cheering.

A few of the faithful have been working on what has become the Firefox code for nearly a decade. They signed on with Netscape just after Marc Andreessen made his way west from the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications to start the browser company. Netscape, of course, introduced the Web to the masses, took Wall Street by storm, and was then crushed by Microsoft. In 1998, a battered Netscape sold out to AOL for $4.2 billion. The release of IE4 that year made it clear that Netscape had lost. Explorer was faster, slicker, preloaded on every new PC, and, though the anti-Microsoft crowd hated to admit it, just plain better than Netscape Communicator, a slow-moving, unwieldy clump of programs. Even AOL wouldn't touch Communicator, choosing to stay with IE as its default browser. In what Netscape veterans now refer to as "the reset," Netscape released the Communicator source code to the world in March 1998 and renamed it Mozilla.

Around this time, Blake Ross, a Florida ninth grader whose coding experience consisted of piecing together a couple of rudimentary videogames, started hacking away at Mozilla. "It was incredible - just realizing that you can touch something that so many people use," says Ross. "It's a great feeling to make a little change to the code and then actually see the change in the window of a big, famous product. You've caused something to happen in an application that's being used all over the world."

In 2000, as Ross was getting comfortable with the nooks and crannies of Mozilla's million-odd lines of code, AOL released Netscape Navigator 6 to a chorus of raspberries from reviewers and users. Inside Netscape, agonized Mozilla programmers tried to clean up the sprawling mess of a product with version 6.1 and 6.2.

Then Ross, known to the Mozilla Foundation as just another precocious, diligent bug fixer, teamed up with Dave Hyatt, a former Netscape user interface programmer who now works for Apple Computer. In 2002, they announced they had "forked" the Mozilla code base, pulling out Mozilla's layout engine, called Gecko, and using a new user interface language, XUL. They posted a short manifesto proposing a tightly written piece of software called mozilla/browser. The goal was modest: no bloat. Inspired by Google's simple interface, they set out to build a stripped-down, stand-alone browser, a refutation of the feature creep that had grounded Netscape. "Lots of Mozilla people didn't get it," Ross recalls. "They'd say, 'This is just the product we have now, but with less features.' Meanwhile, the Mozilla product at the time had about 10,000 options. You basically needed to know the secret handshake to get anything done. It sounds corny, but it was important to make something that Mom and Dad could use."

"Our aim was a browser that could reach the mainstream and get people away from using IE," Hyatt remembers. "There was tension over the way we were coming in and taking control."

Goodger, who was working for Netscape from New Zealand, loved the idea. Like Ross, Goodger had started tinkering with Mozilla code in the late '90s, fixing bugs and submitting hacks that were impressive enough to earn him a job at Mozilla, paid for by Netscape.

Mozilla/browser became Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox, all the while winning converts among the Mozilla crowd. But the two core developers - Ross and Hyatt - got distracted. Hyatt left for Apple in late 2002 to work on the Safari browser. Ross started his freshman year at Stanford the following fall. "The project was bogging down," Hyatt remembers. "Somebody needed to step in and finish the thing." Goodger, a car enthusiast with a blog that goes into exquisite detail about subjects like engine placement and torque, took over. "When I look at cars, I'm looking at how well they are put together, from the panel gaps to the interior fabrics. I suppose I'm very obsessive about detail and style. It helps me make software that looks good and works well."

As the project's lead engineer, Goodger began a frenzied six-month stint of reviewing the code patches and bug fixes forwarded to him by his team and grafting the approved changes onto the growing body of code that made up Firefox. He finished a serviceable beta version just ahead of last summer's rash of IE attacks, setting the stage for Firefox's explosive debut.

Ross vows he has no problem with Microsoft. "If IE worked," he says, sitting at a wobbly café table in Key Biscayne, Florida, during a quick trip to see his family in November, "I wouldn't be against it."

Whatever their motivations, Ross and Goodger have been swept up in anti-Microsoft sentiment. All the attention has been a lot to deal with for a talented but young pair of coders trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

Goodger has gone from low-profile programmer to internationally beloved code fu master with a crush of job offers. To get his head sorted out, Goodger set off in December for a "mind-clearing" drive from Silicon Valley to Seattle along the Pacific Coast Highway in his beloved Caribbean blue Infiniti G35 coupe. "It's my way of resetting the brain," Goodger says. "I like to go on long drives during the transitions between big projects. If you don't take a good break, you can crash and burn."

When he returned from the open road, Goodger declared he'd stay with the Mozilla Foundation. He has already posted the development roadmap for Firefox 2.0, beginning with version 1.1, codenamed Deer Park and scheduled for release in March.

Ross' career focus is only slightly steadier than the average sophomore's. He's definitely going to do a startup. It could launch in three months and make money by charging for online Firefox support. Or maybe it'll go live in five months and sell Firefox extensions that connect social-networking sites (or render them obsolete). He wants to write screenplays. He'll probably stay involved in Firefox, depending on how much time is left after school and the startup. He might have to drop out of Stanford. He'll definitely retain the role of freelance engineering firebrand.

On November 18, nine days after the Firefox 1.0 release, Netscape announced that it was working on a new browser based on Firefox. On his blog, Ross had some tart words for the company that inspired him to start writing code. "You have a history of making unspeakably inane decisions, of waffling when the iron is hot, and of completely abusing your few remaining customers," Ross wrote. "We went off and created Firefox. In fact, we then offered you Firefox and you made another poor decision - perhaps your worst yet - in rejecting it. By all rights, a company with this record should have been relegated to the Silicon Valley recycle bin years ago. Please don't miss this final chance at redemption; deliver what your users want."

The message in Ross' rant was directed at Netscape, but it's just as relevant to Microsoft. If Gates & Co. continue to ignore both the pain of IE users and the lessons in Firefox's advance, they could find Internet Explorer on the scrap heap - next to Netscape.
Contributing editor Josh McHugh (josh@wiredmag.com) wrote about craigslist founder Craig Newmark in issue 12.09.

Education secretary decries PBS cartoon's lesbian content

2005-01-26T17:27:00.000-06:00

Jan. 26, 2005, 12:02AM
Education secretary decries PBS cartoon's lesbian content
By BEN FELLER
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The nation's new education secretary denounced PBS on Tuesday for spending public money on a cartoon with lesbian characters, saying many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles.

The not-yet-aired episode of Postcards From Buster shows the title character, an animated bunny named Buster, on a trip to Vermont — a state known for recognizing same-sex civil unions. The episode features two lesbian couples, although the focus is on farm life and maple sugaring.

A PBS spokeswoman said late Tuesday that the nonprofit network has decided not to distribute the episode, called Sugartime!, to its 349 stations. Buster airs at 3 p.m. weekdays on KUHT-Channel 8.

The spokeswoman said the Education Department's objections were not a factor in that decision. "Ultimately, our decision was based on the fact that we recognize this is a sensitive issue, and we wanted to make sure that parents had an opportunity to introduce this subject to their children in their own time," said Lea Sloan, vice president of media relations at PBS.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the episode does not fulfill the intent Congress had in mind for programming. By law, she said, any funded shows must give top attention to "research-based educational objectives, content and materials."

Bloggers: Just What Are the Rules?

2005-01-26T17:25:00.000-06:00

When Bloggers Make News
As Their Clout Increases,
Web Diarists Are Asking:
Just What Are the Rules?

By JESSICA MINTZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 21, 2005; Page B1

Christopher Frankonis, like many bloggers, first began writing on his Web site about whatever popped into his head -- what kind of day he was having, the craziness of Oregon weather. Sometimes, he would comment on a news story that caught his attention, and provide readers with a link to the story.

Then, two years ago, he launched the Portland Communique, a blog that combines first-hand reporting, opinion, and links to articles about Portland news and politics, from mayoral races to neighborhood meetings. In essence, he became a one-man newspaper with about 400 readers a day. Although he had no formal journalism background, he began thinking of himself as a journalist.

Bloggers such as Mr. Frankonis are finally moving from the alleys and side streets of the Internet into the mainstream. And as their visibility and clout increases, some are asking: what are the rules of the road? There is no exam to pass or society to join to become a blogger -- anybody can set up a "Web log" to publish his or her ideas -- and at last count, an estimated eight million people in the U.S. are doing so, writing on everything from pets to porn. Blogs run the gamut from news and political commentary to hobbies to highly personalized attacks on fellow bloggers. Most blogs let readers post their own comments, which inevitably attract still more, which sometimes devolve into name-calling, all in the span of an afternoon.

The audience for such alternative media is growing rapidly. The number of Americans reading blogs jumped 58% in 2004 to an estimated 32 million people, according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project, with about 11 million looking to political blogs for news during the presidential campaign.

And blogs are increasingly having an impact: bloggers first exposed many of the flaws in CBS's "60 Minutes" episode about President Bush's National Guard service. Blogs, among others, widely disseminated premature exit poll results that led many to believe John Kerry was winning the presidential election for much of Election Day. Bloggers who were paid by people they wrote about have sparked some controversies. In the midst of the fray, bloggers are starting to debate what kinds of ethical responsibilities they have to readers, and standards that might enhance their credibility.

At Harvard University this weekend, a small group of journalists, bloggers and media thinkers are gathering in a conference, "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility" to hash out some of these issues, and kick around the idea of a blogging code of ethics. Should bloggers disclose their sources of income? Do journalists who also blog face conflicting standards?

As conference organizers quickly realized, everything is up for debate. When they posted what sounds like a simple disclaimer for discussion -- "Just because we link to it does not mean we endorse it" -- there were immediate objections.

"Yes, actually, it does," writes a reader called Spinnaker. Another, called Ahem, writes, "Wonderful. What a great precedent for a conference on 'credibility.' " And, "It really isn't necessary for everything in the world to be invented by Harvard in order for there to be patterns, purpose, objectives, ethics and rules," writes GWPDA. The debate dissolved into a name-calling free-for-all. But the point was made: Bloggers are a feisty and independent lot and are not necessarily going to accept traditional dictates meekly.

"Many would say, who are you to tell those in the blogosphere how to behave when mainstream media screws up so significantly and regularly?" says Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute, who helped develop a widely accepted code of ethics and principles for journalists. Still, he says: "Mainstream journalism is imperfect, but a lot of appropriate standards can and should be applied to new forms of communicating."

Some bloggers don't want to be limited to the traditional notions of journalism. "Bloggers should reject the traditional idea of objectivity," says Mickey Kaus, a former New Republic and Newsweek writer whose blog Kausfiles appears on Slate.com. "One of the virtues of blogging is that it's not subject to the professional and bureaucratic restrictions of big media." Mr. Kaus says a formal code isn't needed -- just honesty. He adds: "The point of blogging is to say what you actually think -- opinion, not the traditional ideal of journalism."

Indeed, many bloggers see the blogosphere -- a term some find ridiculous, by the way -- as a vast, open forum in which many perspectives can coexist to create an overall picture that's more accurate than the mainstream media.

But even bloggers who are purporting to give readers just different versions of the news are imparting their own spin, which is the nature of blogging.

"I keep coming back to the idea of personal integrity," says Jeff Jarvis, a blogger at Buzzmachine.com. "It's relevant for us to tell people where we come from, so you can then judge us," he says. "The fact of how I feel about Howard Stern is relevant when I go around defending him. It's fine for people to know that I'm a fan of his."

The same goes for disclosing who pays your salary or funds your Web site's operating costs. "The audience should be able to come to your blog and assume that you're not on the take," says Jason McCabe Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs Inc., which publishes Autoblog.com and Engadget.com. He holds the 45 bloggers that work for him to "old-school" standards: no junkets, no gifts, no review products.

Some bloggers argue that the nature of the medium makes it self-policing. Unlike TV viewers and newspaper readers, blog readers can and do respond instantaneously, especially when they see an inaccuracy. "When I make a mistake, people jump on me like white blood cells on a germ. If I don't correct it, my reputation's going to suffer," says Mr. Jarvis.

While sometimes shocking in its vitriol, the instant feedback from readers keeps bloggers accountable, says Michelle Malkin, a conservative blogger and syndicated columnist who often gets e-mails asking whether she's getting paid by the Bush administration. (The answer is no.) "When you hit that little publish button and something goes up, you know that literally millions of eyeballs around the world are there to parse it," and deconstruct every word. "It certainly raises the stakes," she says.

And it's these same readers who must make their own judgments, some say. "A good thing about blogging is it has sort of forced readers' antenna for bull- to be a little more fine," says Ana Marie Cox, who writes Wonkette.com, a political satire and gossip site. "It lies upon the intelligent reader ... to decide whether they trust what they're reading. It's what they should be doing with newspapers as well."

But the nature of the medium also allows rumors and falsehoods and ad hominem attacks to be spread with lightning speed. "Rumors are always more fun than the truth," says Rebecca Blood, author of "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog." "I think people do scandal-monger and deal in rumor, especially the political advocates."

Like reporters, bloggers can be sued for libel or defamation charges, and they are also protected by the First Amendment. In one case, former U.S. Sen. James G. Abourezk is suing a pair of Web writers in their 20s for libel in U.S. District Court in Sioux Falls, S.D. The writers, Michael Marino and Ben Marino Jr. of Pennsylvania, posted Mr. Abourezk's name in a list of traitors on their ProBush.com Web site. A spokesman for the writers said the list is a parody and thus protected by the First Amendment.

In another case, Apple Computer Inc. has brought a lawsuit against the owner of a Web site run by a Harvard student, Nicholas Ciarelli, called ThinkSecret.com for allegedly revealing trade secrets. An attorney for Mr. Ciarelli said that holding a Web writer accountable for how his source obtained information would have a chilling effect on free speech.

Jay Rosen, the New York University Journalism Department chairman who will kick off the conference, says that as bloggers move away from opinion writing and become a what he calls "citizen-journalists," they will inevitably struggle with the same ethics questions that traditional media did. "The blogger system is necessarily evolving and changing and will go through crises and problems and periods of invention, because it's new," he says.

The dictates of capitalism will no doubt begin affecting which blogs survive and which don't, but not yet. "Right now the currency is readership and respect, not money," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who writes Instapundit.com, a well-read blog. "I don't think you can start reading a blog and immediately know who to trust." That relationship is built over time. Mr. Reynolds says he wouldn't knowingly publish or link to something false -- but as one guy at a computer, there's only so much fact-checking he can do.

All the way back in 2002, Rebecca Blood advised bloggers to disclose their conflicts of interest, publish only what they believe to be true, and correct mistakes publicly. Her counsel to readers? Follow the same rules as one would walking down the street: "Don't make eye contact with someone who seems crazy."

Justices Refuse to Consider Law Banning Gay Adoption

2005-01-26T17:23:00.000-06:00

January 11, 2005
Justices Refuse to Consider Law Banning Gay Adoption
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 - The Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear a challenge to a Florida law that prohibits gay men and lesbians from adopting children.

Florida's is the only such statute in the country, and the prohibition is the only categorical adoption ban on the state's books. Florida evaluates adoption applications from all other would-be adoptive parents, including those who have failed at previous adoptions and those with a history of drug abuse or domestic violence, on a case-by-case basis.

Three gay men and the children they have raised in long-term foster care challenged the statute in a lawsuit filed four years before the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, invalidated that state's criminal sodomy law in a landmark gay-rights ruling.

The Florida plaintiffs had lost their case in Federal District Court in Key West and had already filed their briefs with the federal appeals court in Atlanta when the Lawrence decision was issued in June 2003. Their lawyers then filed supplemental briefs arguing that the Texas decision meant that Florida's law should also fall, as an expression of anti-gay sentiment that the Supreme Court had ruled could not be a basis for public policy.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit disagreed, ruling last January that the Lawrence decision did not refute "the accumulated wisdom of several millennia of human experience" that the "optimal family structure" in which to raise children was one with a mother and father married to each other.

The appeals court then deadlocked 6 to 6 on whether the full court should rehear the case. The rehearing request failed because a rehearing requires a majority vote. One of the judges voting against rehearing the case was William H. Pryor Jr., who was named to the appeals court as a temporary recess appointment by President Bush during an 11-day Congressional recess last February. Had Judge Pryor not participated, the appeals court would have reconsidered the case.

The validity of the Pryor appointment - whether the president's constitutional authority to make appointments "during the recess of the Senate" to positions ordinarily requiring Senate confirmation applies to such short recesses - is the subject of a separate case that has been appealed to the Supreme Court.

Although Florida's adoption law had contained a preference for married couples, the state repealed that provision in 2003. One-quarter of the adoptions in the state are by single people.

The state Legislature voted to prohibit adoptions by gays in 1977, in the midst of a campaign led by the entertainer Anita Bryant to repeal a gay-rights ordinance adopted by Dade County. The state senator who sponsored the adoption measure, Curtis Peterson, said at the time that its purpose was to send a message to the gay community that "we're really tired of you" and "we wish you'd go back into the closet."

Florida permits gay men and lesbians to be foster parents. The lead plaintiff in the case, Steven Lofton, is a licensed foster parent who has taken in eight children with H.I.V. or AIDS, winning an award as the outstanding foster parent of the year from the agency that placed the children in the home he has shared for 20 years with his partner, Roger Croteau. The boy identified in the case as John Doe, now 13, has been with the couple since infancy.

The Supreme Court made no comment Monday in turning down the case, Lofton v. Secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families, No. 04-478. The justices may have decided to permit the Lawrence decision to play out in different contexts in various courts before taking up the gay rights issue once again.

Matthew A. Coles, director of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs, said in an interview that the fact that the Florida law was unique might have limited the court's interest in the case.

Last month in Arkansas, in another suit brought by the A.C.L.U., a state trial judge struck down a law that prohibits placing foster children in a household with a gay adult. Arkansas has announced that it will appeal the ruling. Mr. Coles said the Arkansas case might be the next to reach the Supreme Court.

In another Supreme Court development on Monday, lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in an American court with conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, filed an appeal of a ruling last April that restored the government's right to seek the death penalty while at the same time limiting Mr. Moussaoui's right to seek testimony from captured members of Al Qaeda who have told interrogators that he had nothing to do with the plot.

A federal district judge, Leonie V. Brinkema, ruled in 2003 that without giving Mr. Moussaoui access to favorable witnesses, the government could not seek the death penalty. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, overturned that decision last April, holding that Mr. Moussaoui's right to favorable testimony could be preserved through written summaries rather than direct access to the witnesses, who are being held overseas as enemy combatants.

The Supreme Court appeal, Moussaoui v. United States, was filed under seal because the record contains classified material. One of the lawyers for Mr. Moussaoui, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., described the case as one that concerns "the most fundamental rights of a criminal defendant to mount a defense." The court is expected to make a public version of the petition available next week.

Soccer's Gold Cup coming to Reliant Stadium

2005-01-26T17:21:00.000-06:00

Jan. 25, 2005, 7:47PM

Soccer's Gold Cup coming to Reliant Stadium
By JOHN P. LOPEZ
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Houston's Reliant Stadium will play host this July to the premier soccer event leading up to the 2006 World Cup, the CONCACAF Gold Cup finals.

An official announcement of Gold Cup finals sites is expected Wednesday. The Gold Cup will feature the U.S. men's national team, which currently is in the final qualifying stage for the 2006 World Cup, which will be held in Germany.

Among the U.S. players likely to participate are some of the game's biggest stars, including Landon Donovan, DaMarcus Beasley, Claudio Reyna, Clint Mathis and goalkeepers Kasey Keller and Brad Freidel.

A match between the United States and Mexico -- bitter rivals -- is highly likely in the Gold Cup. In a 2002 World Cup elimination game between the teams, Team USA staged a 2-0 win over Mexico, earning a first-ever trip to the World Cup quarterfinals.

Mexico, the defending 2003 Gold Cup champions, and Team USA own automatic bids into the tournament based on world rankings and past Gold Cup results.

Other national teams in the 12-team Confederation of North American, Central American and Caribbean nations tournament likely would include world notables such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Trinidad and Tobago, Honduras, Jamaica, Canada and Guatemala.

Two national teams from outside CONCACAF also are invited to the Gold Cup. In recent Gold Cup tournaments, one of those teams has been world power Brazil.

Considered the showpiece event for this International Soccer Federation (FIFA) region, the biannual tournament will take on added significance this year as national teams prepare for the 2006 World Cup.

As it prepares for World Cup finals qualifying, the U.S. men's national team has upcoming games against Trinidad and Tobago in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad on Feb. 9, and a highly anticipated rematch with Mexico on March 26 at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City.

The Gold Cup event will be without question the biggest in a string of world-class events that Reliant and Soccer United Marketing has brought to Houston, including the recently completed InterLiga final-four and the 2003 USA-Mexico "friendly," which drew more than 65,000 fans to Reliant Stadium.

Fire destroys historic church near downtown

2005-01-26T17:19:00.000-06:00

Jan. 24, 2005, 12:44PM
Fire destroys historic church near downtown
By PEGGY O'HARE
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

A historic church was destroyed by fire early this morning, tying up Houston fire crews for hours as they worked to douse the flames.

The blaze gutted the Bethel Baptist Church, built in the 1920s at Andrews and Crosby streets. Smoke from the fire was still visible to motorists driving on the Pierce Elevated late this morning.

The fire broke out around 5 a.m. No injuries were reported. The church has been vacant for several years, said Houston Fire Department District Chief Tommy Dowdy.

Arson investigators were unable to determine what started the fire, and the burned building is too unstable for them to enter safely, Dowdy said. Fire crews will tear the building down, and the fire's cause likely will remain undetermined, he said.

Bush protestors stage march to City Hall

2005-01-26T16:50:00.000-06:00

Jan. 22, 2005, 7:12PM

Bush protestors stage march to City Hall
By ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

They marched. They yelled. And they carried signs with such slogans as: "Bush lied, thousands died."

Days after the inauguration of President Bush for a second term, more than 100 protesters marched in downtown Houston to let the world know that even on Bush's home turf some were resisting his administration.

Perhaps Aswad Walker, an instructor in the University of Houston African American Studies program and pastor of Houston's Shrine of the Black Madonna, best summed up the feelings of the angry protestors:

"We've got some joker who stole the White House two times who is now trying to tell us how to live our lives."

Social change was the order of the day: ending the war in Iraq, stopping racial intolerance, repealing the Patriot Act, defending women's reproductive rights and ending environmental harm were all among the calls.

The march, organized by a coalition of groups including the Harris County Green Party, Progressive Workers Organizing Committee and Latinos Por La Paz, went from Market Square to City Hall.

Along the way they were needled by about a dozen Bush supporters affiliated with a group called Protest Warrior, which counters left-thinking gatherings.

"Most of us are not protestors by nature," said Julie Braverman, a Sugar Land resident who was taking a short break from telling the protestors that Saddam Hussein killed 3 million of his own people.

"So all of this seems a little ludicrous to us. But we just feel like we can't let them get away with it."

Shortly afterward the protest had its only mildly violent moment. A line of the protestors began marching toward the Bush supporters, backing them into the street and oncoming traffic. Horns honked as the traffic stopped. Soon Houston police arrived and the march proceeded peacefully.

If the march was peaceful, the rhetoric was much more spirited.

"Bush was never, never supposed to occupy the presidency," said Cristobal Hinojosa, of the group Mexicanos en Accion. "But he's occupying the presidency just like the troops are occupying Iraq -- with no reason. We are not going to bend our heads to power. We are going to continue to fight for what is right."

Among the rallyers were half a dozen young men and women dressed in black. They carried a banner stating: "Whoever they vote for, we are ungovernable."

2005-01-26T16:43:00.000-06:00

Marco Sasia for The New York Times
Lingotto, formerly a factory, will hold the Winter Olympics ice skating events next year.

Marco Sasia for The New York Times
Mole Antonelliana's spire.

Marco Sasia for The New York Times
Al Bicerin is one of the city's historic cafes.

The New York Times
Map of Turin. Numbers on this map correspond to numbers in the article.

January 23, 2005
GOING TO
Turin
By ERIC SYLVERS

Why Go Now

Because in 2006, when friends are bragging about going to Turin for the Winter Olympics, you can say: "Oh, I went there last year. You really must check out this great focacceria on the Via Perrone."

Detractors say Turin is Calvinistic and reserved. The locals nod in agreement mostly because they want to distinguish themselves from fashion-obsessed Milan, 90 miles to the east. Do not be fooled. Turin is full of life, and like their compatriots to the south, its citizens spend their fair share of time congregating in numerous squares, strolling through the heart of town or chatting in a cafe.

Turin is transforming itself from a faded industrial powerhouse (home to Fiat) into a city capable of impressing the world as host to the 2006 Winter Olympics. Val di Susa and Val Chisone, site of the skiing events, are a 90-minute drive from Turin - too far to make the city an après-ski destination, but close enough to make a day trip practically mandatory.

Where to Stay

The nicest places are around the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, the Piazza San Carlo or in the Quadrilatero Romano.

Just a step from the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, the (1) Casa Marga, at Via Bava, 1 Bis, (39-011) 883-892, offers Italian hospitality at budget prices. Margareta Corongiu rents out the two front rooms of her house and treats you like family. One room has a full-size bed in a loft and a sofa bed (twin) below; the other has a twin bed. Both rooms, clean and simple, have private baths. Breakfast, often with jam and yogurt made by Margareta, is included. The double is $87, at $1.34 to the euro (discounts for stay of four days or more).

Although the lobby of the (2) Hotel Dogana Vecchia, Via Corte d'Appello, 4, (39-011) 436-6752, with its vaulted ceiling, white columns and elaborate glass chandeliers, is quite a bit more regal than the rooms, this is a pleasant place to stay for the sense of the city's former grandeur that it provides. Illustrious former guests are said to have included Verdi, Mozart and Napoleon. Doubles: $140 to $160.

(3) Le Meridien Lingotto Art & Tech, Via Nizza, 262, (39-011) 664-2000 or (800) 543-4300, is part of a former Fiat factory converted by the architect Renzo Piano into a complex with two hotels, a conference center, museum and shopping area. It is a few miles south of the main train station and can be reached by tram or taxi. Standard rooms - simply furnished, with cherrywood paneling and sleek desks - are $536 (suites, $1,340), with a special weekend rate of $200.

Where to Eat

(4) Porto di Savona, Piazza Vittorio Veneto, 2, (39-011) 817-3500, serves reasonably priced food in a casual, homey atmosphere. The intimate setting - several small rooms with wood paneling and photos of Turin's glory years as Savoy's capital - and general lack of tourists make this a good place to sample local specialties such as agnolotti (raviolilike pasta filled with beef or lamb), bollito misto (a variety of boiled meats) and trout in a hazelnut sauce. A three-course dinner for two (without wine) costs $80.

Alessandro Boglione, the head chef at (5) AB+, Via della Basilica, 13, (39-011) 439-0618, defines his creations as modern Mediterranean. Recent dishes have included a warm, creamy broccoli soup with grilled squid and thyme. Nothing is dull and everything is utterly fresh. AB+ has been open only since mid-October, but word is spreading fast, making reservations a necessity to get a table alongside the eclectic clientele that includes some of Turin's most prominent figures. The lighting is dim and the tables are far enough apart to allow some privacy. Two people can eat their fill for $100 before tacking on the wine, which runs the gamut all the way to $135 bottles of Barolo. Open for dinner only; closed Sunday.

Pizza by the slice is plentiful around town, and some of the best is at the (6) (7) Antica Focacceria Genovese, at Via Perrone, 2, and Via San Domenico, 24. You will find specialties from Liguria, Piedmont's southern neighbor, such as farinata (a chickpea flat bread). About $2 a slice.

Turin's historic cafes, some of which date back more than 200 years, are wonderful for people-watching or just plain resting. (8) Al Bicerin, Piazza della Consolata, 5, is near the market in Porta Palazzo, making it an ideal place to fuel up before the shopping trip or to recompose afterward. The specialty is the bicerin ($5.35), a calorie bomb made with coffee, chocolate and cream, definitely worth a stop. Closed Wednesday.

(9) At Caffè Torino, Piazza San Carlo, 204, if you order one sweet, the tuxedo-clad waiters bring you a selection of several similar ones (but you are charged only for the ones you eat). A regal winding staircase and marble fireplaces may make you want to sit and sip, but just be aware that a cappuccino served at the table ($6) costs three times what it does at the bar.

What to Do During the Day

Be sure to explore the Via Garibaldi (a milelong pedestrian mall) and the Via Po (one of the best examples of the city's arcaded thoroughfares and a local favorite for its book stalls, elegant stores and cafes), but also some of the tiny back streets in the Quadrilatero Romano.

The blockbuster exhibition "Impressionists and the Snow" runs until April 25 at (10) Promotrice delle Belle Arti, Via Balsamo Crivelli, 11, in the Parco del Valentino, and includes paintings by Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Pissarro and Munch - on loan from museums and collections around the world. Try going early (doors open at 9 a.m.) or at lunch to avoid the biggest crowds. Information: (39-0438) 221-306. Admission $13.40.

The (11) Mole Antonelliana, a stunning structure that stands out in Turin's mostly uniform skyline, contains the National Museum of Cinema, Via Montebello, 20, (39-011) 812-5658, [url]www.museonazionaledelcinema.org.[/url] When construction began in the 1860's, the Mole was intended to become a synagogue. Now it contains props, sets, posters and scripts tracing the development of moviemaking. Ride the glass elevator to the lookout platform, from where you can gaze at the nearby Alps. Admission $7; with elevator ticket, $9.10. The museum is closed Monday.

The (12) Egyptian Museum, Via Accademia delle Scienze, 6, (39-011) 561-7776, contains artifacts spanning virtually the entire history of Egyptian culture, though a lack of English panels beyond the first rooms can be disorienting; $8.70. Closed Monday.

What to Do at Night

(13) Teatro Regio, Piazza Castello, 215, [url]www.teatroregio.torino.it[/url] (Italian only), (39-011) 8815-557 (information) or (39-011) 8815-241 (tickets), the city's opera house, is presenting "Don Giovanni" at the end of January and early February, followed in March by "Il Trovatore." Tickets run from $23 to $205.

To rub elbows with an eclectic mix of young, hip locals, try the new AB+ (downstairs from the restaurant with the same name, above). Live music a few nights a week, when the large crowd gets larger. No cover. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Below street level on both sides of the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele you will find lots of bars and dance places. The area, known as I Murazzi, slows down in the winter, but there is always some sign of life, including at the

(14) Beach, a disco north of the bridge ([url]www.thebeachtorino.it[/url]), and (15) Giancarlo, a bar south of the bridge that attracts Turin's alternative crowd. Things are generally at their liveliest from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Where to Shop

The Via Garibaldi has boutiques, while the Via Roma has the more famous fashion names. For a great selection of local sweets such as marron glacé, try (16) Pasticceria Ghigo, Via Po, 52. Closed Tuesday and Sunday afternoon.

At the enormous daily market at the (17) Porta Palazzo, in the Piazza della Repubblica, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. (closed Sunday), you will find fruit, vegetables and probably anything else you might be looking for, whether it's a coat hook or a frying pan. On Saturday the market spills into the surrounding streets; on the second Sunday of the month there is also an antiques market.

How to Stay Wired

Internet cafes are still rare. At (18) 1PC4You, Via Giuseppe Verdi, 20G, you can log on for $2.70 to $4 an hour.

Your First Time or 10th

Have a light breakfast of pastries and cappuccino at (19) La Drogheria, Piazza Vittorio Veneto, 18, (39-011) 812-2414, while reading one of the international newspapers on one of its relaxing couches, and then head to the nearby (20) Parco del Valentino for a meander along the Po, just as captivating with a splendidly shining sun as with fog so thick that you can't see the other side.

How to Get There

There are no nonstop flights from New York. Alitalia (about $490), Delta ($525), Lufthansa ($550) and Air France ($600) all fly to Turin with one stopover.

Getting Around

Turin's relatively small city center makes slow-paced strolling the best way to move about. But these tram lines come in handy: No. 13 cuts through the center connecting the Piazza Vittorio Veneto with the Porta Susa train station; No. 15 links Piazza Vittorio Veneto with the Porta Nuova train station; No. 16 runs a line from Parco del Valentino to Piazza Vittorio Veneto and on to Porta Palazzo. Tram fare: $1.20.

[url]http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/travel/23goingto.html[/url]

Shadows on the Wall

2005-01-26T16:39:00.000-06:00

The Gothic hulk on Central Park West, once a cancer hospital, then a scandal-ridden nursing home, is being reborn as a luxury condominium.

January 23, 2005
Shadows on the Wall
By JIM RASENBERGER

ON a late night in the early 1980's, Mary Beth Polasek, accompanied by her then-husband, Ted, and a friend named Charlie, ventured into the old castle on Central Park West and 106th Street. Guided by the beams of their flashlights, they creaked up the stairs to the top floor, passed through a wide hall, then entered one of the turrets. The circular room was vast and empty, and littered with chunks of plaster. The high conical roof, damaged years earlier in a fire, gaped open to the elements and the dim stars.

Long ago, the building had been the notorious Towers Nursing Home, and long before that, the renowned New York Cancer Hospital. Now it was an abandoned ruin. Everyone in the neighborhood simply called it "the castle" because its gray stone walls, five turrets and gabled dormers all gave it the countenance of a Gothic fortress. Like any castle worthy of the name, this one was gloomy and forbidding. Stray cats slinked through the weeds and rubbish. Next door, the Castle Hotel ran a brisk trade in prostitution and crack.

Ms. Polasek should have been afraid that night, but she was not. "I've seen a lot of ghosts since then," she said recently. "But I didn't see any that night. I wasn't spooked. We were young and foolish. We were crazy, happy kids."

Before leaving, Ms. Polasek rescued a few discarded artifacts. In one room, she came upon an "unspeakably lovely" antique wooden toilet. In another, she discovered sepia-stained photographs of men and women spilling out of several open suitcases. Ms. Polasek, an artist, took the photographs home and set them into a collage. "They must be the people who lived there," she said. "I wanted to save them."

Only later did it occur to her that their spirits might have been present the night she entered the castle. Or, more to the point, that they are still there today, looking down in shock from their spectral perches as 455 Central Park West - as the castle was recently christened - is reborn as a luxury condominium.

Ms. Polasek will not be among those moving in. "As much as I would love to have $7 million for an apartment," she said, "I would never want to live in a building that I think is probably haunted."

This sentiment is shared by many who have lived near the castle through its long demise and, now, its astonishing transformation. Whether they believe the castle is literally haunted by the dead or only figuratively haunted by the past, many Manhattan Valley residents find its restoration strangely unsettling, not to mention utterly incongruous with the dilapidated ruin they came to know and even love.

Next month, with most of the units in its new adjoining 26-story high-rise already taken, 17 apartments in the landmark castle will be finished and ready for occupancy. Priced from $3.5 million to $7 million, the apartments will feature cavernous circular living rooms with lofty ceilings and splendid park views, and will include such amenities as a spa, an indoor lap pool, and 24-hour concierge service. As the sales brochure puts it, residents will be bathed in "surpassing opulence" and "timeless elegance," while "reverently preserved architectural details echo a grander age."

Not to be heard among the echoes is a word about the actual past of the building. The omission is slightly ludicrous but entirely predictable. As anyone who has lived in New York longer than a few weeks knows, the past is easily discarded in this city. Buildings change, their contents shift, and eventually just about everybody who knew what was once where forgets or dies.

This truth is hard enough to accept when it applies to a favorite corner restaurant; harder still when it applies to a building with a troubling past. Surely such buildings have earned themselves immunity from forgetfulness.

In fact, though, they have not. Addresses that once seared themselves into the city's consciousness - the Kew Gardens foyer where Kitty Genovese was slain by a psychopath in 1964; the Greenwich Village brownstone where Joel Steinberg beat his daughter and wife in the 1980's - are forgotten. The Octagon Tower on Roosevelt Island, once home of the forlorn New York City Lunatics Asylum, is about to be incorporated into a mixed-income housing development. The former Asch Building near Washington Square, where 146 people perished in the 1911 Triangle Waist Company fire, now thrives as a biology building at New York University.

It's a good bet that most New Yorkers could not identify that building if they walked right past it, a memory lapse that would have been unthinkable to anyone who lived here in 1911 - nearly as unthinkable as the possibility that future New Yorkers will be unable to identify the spot where the World Trade Center once stood.

Morphine and Champagne

Nothing as harrowing as the Triangle fire ever occurred at 455 Central Park West, but the building has endured a good deal of misfortune. When the New York Cancer Hospital was founded in the 1880's, cancer was widely considered incurable, as well as contagious and shameful. The hospital was the country's first to devote itself exclusively to the care of cancer patients, and every effort was made to build a state-of-the-art facility equal to the task.

Inspired as much by modern medical theory as by 16th-century French chateaux, the architect Charles Haight's round towers were designed to deter germs and dirt from accumulating in sharp corners. An airshaft running vertically through the center of each tower - the very latest in 19th-century ventilation technology - prevented air from stagnating in the wards. Altogether, commended The New York Times in 1888, the features marked "a new departure in hospital construction and make this admirable structure a model of its kind."

For all the purified air, tragedy seeped quickly into the hospital's thick walls. One of its chief benefactors, Elizabeth Hamilton Cullum, died of uterine cancer within months of laying the cornerstone. Another, Charlotte Augusta Astor (she and her husband, John Jacob Astor III, donated most of the money) died of cancer a week after the hospital opened in December 1887, missing her chance to be cured.

Not that she could have been cured. Treatment for cancer was mostly palliative in those days. Many patients who came to West 106th came, in effect, to die, assuaged by morphine, whiskey and Champagne. (Tellingly, the hospital spent more on alcoholic beverages than on medical supplies.) Other forms of relief included carriage rides in Central Park and Sunday services in the hospital's Chapel of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, patron saint of the suffering.

Largely because cancer remained so deadly, the hospital soon ran into money troubles. It came to be known as "the Bastille," a place to be feared and avoided by patients and patrons. In 1899, in an effort to attract more of both, administrators of the beleaguered hospital changed its name to the General Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases.

The new name heralded a golden age for the hospital - a positively glowing age, in fact. Using radium, the radioactive material discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, doctors at Memorial pioneered new techniques to burn away cancers with X-rays. By 1920, Memorial was among the world's leading cancer hospitals. It was also the country's single largest repository of radium, holding just shy of four grams (valued at $400,000) in a brick and steel vault. The following year, Madame Curie herself came to West 106th Street to admire the hospital's advancements.

In retrospect, early radiation treatments were often worse than the disease they were meant to cure. Radiation caused severe burns and, in some cases, additional cancers. There may have been cause for hope at West 106th Street, but there was no end to suffering, a suffering made all the more dreadful by the vision, through the windows, of a smokestack to the west of the main building. Back there was the crematorium.

Only after Memorial moved out of the building to the East Side of Manhattan (where it expanded into the present day Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) did life at the castle reach its full measure of dreadfulness. In 1955, the building became the Towers Nursing Home, the largest and most infamous member of a nursing home empire run by Bernard Bergman and his family. By the early 1970's, the Towers was at the center of state and federal investigations into Medicaid fraud and other crimes.

In the meantime, the home's elderly charges went neglected. A Times reporter visiting in 1974 noted that patients looked bleary-eyed and stupefied. Floors were filthy, and a "pervasive odor" tainted the air. Patients testified to "atrocious conditions," including inadequate heat, pest infestations and physical abuse.

The nursing home was finally closed in 1974. There was talk of tearing it down, but in 1976, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building a landmark, thereby condemning it not to the wrecking ball but to slow death by decrepitude.

Where Beasts Were Born (on Film)

It was during this third, and seemingly terminal, stage of the castle's life that many Manhattan Valley residents first came to know it. Even those who never dared set foot in the place felt its gravitational pull. Michael Kelly, a local filmmaker, often trained his camera on the building for hours at a time, transfixed. Gary Dennis, now owner of a neighborhood video store, recalls sneaking out at lunch from Public School 145 to surveil the castle with his friends.

"We never got real close," Mr. Dennis said. "It was too scary."

Among Mr. Dennis's current wares is a 1982 movie entitled "Q: The Winged Serpent." The plot concerns a dragonlike beast that lives atop the Chrysler Building and preys on Manhattanites. In the last shot, after the beast has been slain and order restored, the camera pans down 106th Street, into a burnt-out turret of the castle, then closes in on a giant egg hidden inside the ruin. The castle was exactly the sort of place you'd expect to find the giant egg of a man-eating serpent.

Years passed, and trees grew from the mortar between the bricks. Mysterious fires lit the roof, graffiti blemished the walls. But as it crumbled, its allure grew. Martha Flach, a graduate student at Columbia in the early 90's, was intrigued enough to devote her master's thesis to the building. The project required frequent excursions to what was then a dicey neighborhood.

"I'd go to photograph it, and the police would see this skinny white girl and tell me to be careful," said Ms. Flach, who now works for the World Monuments Fund. "But the people who lived around there, even the drug dealers and the prostitutes, were always coming up to me to ask me questions about it. They were fascinated."

Occasionally, a developer expressed interest in the property, most promisingly Ian Schrager, the hotel impresario, who bought it in the late 1980's. But inevitably, the deals fell through, and the decay continued.

"We used to stand in the dog park on top of the hill, and people would play this game," Mr. Kelly said. "We called it the Castle Fantasy Game. Given unlimited resources, what would you do with the building?"

A condo might not have been high on anyone's fantasy list, but it was the solution favored by Daniel McLean, the Chicago developer who purchased the property in 2000. He would have many opportunities to regret his decision. No sooner had he secured financing than 9/11 struck, causing the bank to withdraw its loan. After resuming construction a year later, he fired the superintendent, who exacted revenge by reporting the building for health code violations.

"Six weeks into the deal he's calling the city telling them we have dead birds inside and West Nile virus," Mr. McLean said. "It just for some reason was the kind of building that anything that could go wrong, went wrong."

The hardest challenge may be yet to come. Trying to entice very wealthy buyers to live above West 96th Street flies in the face of conventional real estate wisdom. Then there is the building's macabre past. "We obviously don't dwell on that part of the history," Mr. McLean acknowledged. "We don't go into the crematorium part."

At least one buyer has no trouble accepting either the building's location or its history. Daniel Lufkin, founding partner of the securities firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, has bought what may be the most spectacular apartment in the complex, if not the city: the former Chapel of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, now a duplex with high arched windows and original wooden beams.

Mr. Lufkin is aware of the building's past, but said it did nothing to dampen his or his wife's ardor. "It could have been a prison and we'd have been interested," he said. "The history is fascinating, but what's really fascinating is the building itself." Mr. Lufkin is convinced that, after a year or so, other buyers will flock in behind. "Everybody and his brother will be trying to move in."

Renovated, Then Resurrected

He may be right, and there, in a nutshell, is the moral of the tale. One person's haunted castle is another's park-vu condo. A building's history, however gripping or traumatic, is not lapidary, not even when posted on a plaque. That buildings find new reasons for being is not in itself a bad thing.

"You go to Rome, you go to Paris, you go to any old city, buildings keep being reused," said Françoise Bollack, an architect and historic preservationist who has studied the castle. "And some of them have really terrible pasts." Formerly Fascist monoliths in Berlin, she points out, are filled with ghosts far less friendly than any likely to haunt the old castle on Central Park West.

Old buildings are there to tell us who we were. When their stories are odd or chilling, all the more reason to listen. The trick, Ms. Bollack said, is to acknowledge a building's previous life while embracing its future. "The past should never be forgotten," she said. Still, she added, "Life goes on."

It's a paradox Ms. Polasek struggles to accept as she watches the neighborhood she has lived in for more than 20 years change under the shadows of the castle that has so long defined it.

"They just put millions of dollars into a place that was falling apart," Ms. Polasek said. "I don't want to be judgmental. I want to try to like what has happened. I want to try to accept that nothing stays the same."

After Ms. Polasek and her husband divorced, a boyfriend persuaded her to purge some of the objects she'd gathered from the castle that night long ago; he thought they reminded her too much of her ex-husband. As she stood by, weeping, he tossed out the old things, including the exquisite toilet, an apt metaphor for flushing away the past.

The boyfriend is gone now, too. Ms. Polasek still has the photographs, though, and on a cold bright day she sat by her window, just a stone's throw from the old castle, looking down at the faces of the dead people. She wishes the castle's new tenants the best. But she is fairly certain they will be sharing the place with ghosts.

This is exactly how it should be. Those who wish to seize the day may go ahead and seize it. Those who care to see the ghosts are free to see them. In a great old building like the castle, there is room for both the living and the dead.

Jim Rasenberger is the author of "High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline."

[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/nyregion/thecity/23feat.html[/url]

A Fifth Ward success story

2005-01-26T16:36:00.000-06:00

Jan. 23, 2005, 1:00AM
A Fifth Ward success story
Brown's president shares goals with alumni
By MARY VUONG
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Virtually every news story about Ruth J. Simmons hails her as the first African-American to preside over an Ivy League university.

The accomplishment is hardly something this down-to-earth woman, raised in East Texas and the Fifth Ward of Houston, wears on her sleeve.

In an interview, Simmons said she would like her legacy to be, simply, the "president who came along and did what was required for the time." That includes being a model to her students, pushing them to respect differences and contribute to society.

Simmons, in her fourth year leading Brown University and its nearly 7,600 students in Providence, R.I., was in Houston last week to meet local alumni.

Her goals for Brown include increasing faculty by 100 to improve course offerings and reduce class size, and improving financial aid for graduate students. The school also has instituted a need-blind admission policy for undergraduate students starting with the class of 2007.

Simmons, 59, is often asked how she has survived in academia for so long. After graduating from Dillard University in New Orleans, she earned a doctorate in Romance languages and literature at Harvard University. She established the first engineering program at a women's school as president of Smith College, and has held teaching and administrative roles elsewhere.

When Simmons was starting out, many of her friends in education were leaving the field. Some for promising possibilities, others frustrated by the lack of advancement opportunities. Then there were those who, like she did, believed education was the "greatest hope for hastening equality" — they left because they were no longer fulfilled, because the road to equality never seemed to end.

Simmons' belief, though, only strengthened.

She grew up poor, the youngest of 12 children. Her parents were sharecroppers in Grapeland who later became a factory worker and maid in the Fifth Ward. She attended a segregated Wheatley High School, and the racial climate back then — "I grew up understanding what it feels like to be diminished every day of your life," she says — made it difficult to aspire to certain professions.

"School was the only bright spot that I saw," says Simmons, who plans to retire in Houston and return to the classroom to share her experiences. "Education permits you to go anywhere."

She used to feel like an "invited guest" at Harvard until she realized she offered as much to the school as it to her. Her upbringing reminds her "that a person's economic or social standing has nothing to do with character, intelligence, personality," and she immediately connects with students on financial aid and reassures them of their right to be at Brown.

Without family, teachers and strangers supporting her college education, Simmons believes she would have remained in Houston and become a blue-collar, hard-working and earnest employee, but not a leader.

Despite her sucess, Simmons still sees herself as a product of the Fifth Ward. She freely shares her difficulties as a student, hoping to encourage those having trouble in their own classes; Simmons once struggled so much in an undergrad French class that she considered dropping it, only to go on to achieve her doctorate in the subject.

And when the interview comes to a close, she rises from her seat in a private room at the Menil Collection and wonders if she should bus the area and return the glass of water that had been served to her.

When Simmons started at Brown, "I was concentrating more on making sure I didn't fail," she says. "Now I never think about that. Once you become immersed in the job, all the things you care about come back to you."

Jeffrey Eugenides coming to Houston for reading at the Alley

2005-01-26T16:34:00.000-06:00

Jan. 21, 2005, 1:10PM
Jeffrey Eugenides coming to Houston for reading at the Alley
By FRITZ LANHAM
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Hermaphrodites don't narrate many novels. Which perhaps is odd because, as Jeffrey Eugenides says, every good novelist is a sort of hermaphrodite, trying to get inside the heads of both men and women.
Group Discussion

An informal book-club style discussion of Jeffrey Eugenides' novels will be held 3-4 p.m. today at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet. Christa Forster, a poet, playwright and performer who teaches at St. John's School, will lead the discussion. Admission is free.

In Middlesex, Eugenides took up the challenge of creating a realistic hermaphroditic narrator (actually a pseudohermaphrodite, a genetic male with imperfectly developed genitalia). The result was a large-hearted multigenerational comic epic that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003 and is one of the most admired novels of recent years.

Eugenides (pronounced yu-GIN-e-dees) will read at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Alley Theatre in the 2004-2005 Inprint Brown Reading Series. It will be his first Texas appearance.

At its core Middlesex is the coming-of-age story of Cal — short for Calliope — Stephanides, a Greek-American kid growing up in suburban Detroit in the 1960s and '70s. But the novel ranges over eight decades, telling the story of Cal's Greek immigrant grandparents (source of Cal's wayward genes) and his parents. Everything from Prohibition-era bootlegging to the Detroit race riot of 1967 to adolescent Cal's clumsy and comic sexual awakening figures into the plot.

Middlesex was preceded by Eugenides' well-received debut novel, The Virgin Suicides. Published in 1993, it tells the story of five teenage sisters who commit suicide, and despite the grim-sounding subject matter the book manages to be both touching and comic. Director Sophia Coppola made The Virgin Suicides into a critically acclaimed movie.

Eugenides was born in Detroit in 1960 and grew up in suburban Grosse Point, Mich. As a schoolboy he studied Latin, reading Ovid (where he came across the hermaphroditic seer Tiresias) and falling under the sway of Virgil. He once said The Aeneid influenced him more than any other book, although he also cites the great Russians — Tolstoy, Nabokov — and American novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth as influences. He studied writing at Brown University with John Hawkes and at Stanford University with Gilbert Sorrentino.

From 1999 to 2004, Eugenides, his wife and daughter lived in Berlin, where he was a fellow at the American University. The family now lives in Chicago.

Eugenides' reading will be followed by an onstage interview and a book sale and signing. Admission is $5, free for students and seniors. Doors open at 6:45 p.m. For information call 713-521-2026.

The town downtown

2005-01-24T21:52:00.000-06:00

Jan. 23, 2005, 12:35AM
The town downtown
As city's center comes to life, newcomers — and old-timers — rediscover urban life
By DAVID THEISS
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Karen Warren / Chronicle
GATHERING PLACE: Cheryl Pierce surfs the Web, and Susie McMullan bonds with a cat in the Keystone Lofts apartment of Amanda Jones and Matt Reading, who relocated from Austin.

Brett Coomer / Chronicle
ART PARTY: Artist Ross Irwin, from left, Caryn Landauer, Thomas G. H. Dorsch and Nicola Parente, work on a project on the floor of Parente's downtown loft.

Brett Coomer / Chronicle
GARDEN SPOT: Pam Krischke waters her plants on her Hermann Lofts balcony.

I keep hearing people pay Houston's street scene the ultimate compliment: It makes you feel like you're someplace else — New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans. One thing we all agree on: Houston can't go back to the blahs. Street life for the masses is here to stay. Downtown is here to stay.

Now street life really only cranks up around 10:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. And the crowd might be mixed in race, but it isn't in age, or in its ideas of what makes for a good time. It's a little dispiriting, actually, to this boho of a certain age, to look at the clubs along Main and say, "This is our downtown? A place where young people can dance in old buildings?"

But when I start to brood about downtown's future, I wander into Kaveh Kanes coffee house. When I step in to find a very young-looking jazz quartet tearing through an original composition, and see the customers talking or listening or maybe even reading and, blessedly, none of them posing, I feel that I've entered a pocket of reality. The owner of the coffee house, Ben Fullelove, surprises me with the news that he and his family have moved downtown, into the Rice. It's temporary, while his house is being remodeled, but Fullelove is happy here. "It's weird," he says, "but downtown is the part of Houston that feels most like a small town. You keep running into people you know."

Soon, when I get my own chance to spend more time downtown, through the loan of a loft, I come to realize what Fullelove means about the area's small-townness. For all its apparent glitz, downtown may be the Houston neighborhood where you're most likely to not only know your neighbors but even knock on their door to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar.

I got to live the urban dream recently when my wife, son, dog and I crashed in the Hermann Lofts on Milam for three nights that turned into a week. We were having too much fun to go home. I set myself the challenge of going 72 hours without getting in a car. No sweat. I walked to ballet, baseball and movies. Hopping on the rail, we had the perfect Saturday morning, shopping at a farmers market and pancaking at the Breakfast Klub. The pooch even got her turn, with a rare unleashed run along the bayou. And yes, I did say, "I feel like I'm somewhere else."

But I was just a tourist.

Informal Survey

What's it like for the people who live downtown? The answers range from pretty good to pretty great. In my informal survey, the starriest-eyed residents tend to be the most recently arrived, especially two households that just moved from Austin. In these cases, the kindling wood of low expectations makes Houston and downtown both shine more brightly.

Amanda Jones and her boyfriend, Matt Reading, moved here when Jones was transferred last May. Unenthused about changing cities, the couple rented an apartment in the Keystone Lofts on Texas so they could be near Jones' downtown job while they looked for a permanent home. But they soon found themselves falling for downtown.

Jones even says those words that sound so strange to a Houstonian: "Houston is a lot better than Austin." It's clear, though, that when she says Houston, she means downtown. "You can walk everywhere, and there's so much to do. You have access to lots of interests, and there are lots of great people." Reading chimes in, "This can be your headline: Austinite pleasantly surprised by Houston."

The other pair of Austin refugees have an even better story. David and Pam Krischke are native Houstonians who moved away in the '70s. David was a college football coach, and when he quit in the mid-'80s, they opened a printing business in Austin. They did well enough that when they sold it a few years ago, they were able to retire young. But their rather vigorous idea of retirement meant they were free to spend their weeks working as substitute teachers in the public schools.

About a year ago, downtown real-estate agent Minnette Boesel sold them an apartment in the Hermann Lofts and a vision of the urban life. But they continued to teach during the week in Austin, returning to Houston for the weekends. I've heard of people arranging for their lives to run in the other direction, but to work in Austin and weekend in Houston — never.

But to the Krischkes, the arrangement wasn't so exotic. David says, "Austin's great if you're under 35 and want to go hear live music. But here you can do it all. You can hear music, or go to the theater or to major-league sports. And you can walk everywhere. It's safe. You see homeless people, but all they do is panhandle you. They're not going to hurt you."

Like everyone else I talked to, he does wish there were at least a small grocery store downtown.

They like it so much, they dropped the substitute-teaching gig and moved here full time. Or at least they had, until David said he needed yet another challenge and signed up to go to Iraq as a kind of morale coach for the troops. "Maybe I'm naïve, but I don't feel like I'll be in danger," he says. Pam, who is about to start a new downtown job herself, looks on her husband's Iraq adventure with apparent equanimity. "I'm not worried," she says.

'More European'

So, yes, downtown has attracted some remarkable newcomers, including artist Nicola Parente from Italy. He moved into the Bayou Lofts three years ago and uses his 900-square-foot apartment as both living space and studio.

To create a work space, he pushes his furniture against the walls and just throws dropcloths on the floor. He recently had his first sold-out one-man show, but he's most eager to talk about his artist collaborative, Inventive Art, in which he and three other artists meet in his apartment to work together on paintings. "It's not like the Bauhaus collaborations, where each painter only worked on one corner of the canvas. We actually paint over each others' strokes, so it's a true collaboration," Parente says.

Parente gets excited talking about making art and living downtown. "It feels more European," he says. "You're forced to walk on the street, and then you meet people." He also finds a downtown market for his work. His pieces hang in a couple of cafes, Blank Canvas and Franklin Street Coffee, and the 6 Degrees bar has commissioned a mural from him when it opens from its current remodeling. "It's a fantastic market here," Parente says. "And there are lots of good artists."

Some Disappointments

But living in the heart of Houston also has its disappointments, at least for Treebeards owners Dan Tidwell and Jamie Mize, who were early downtowners. In 1994, with three other people, they bought the small unnamed building next door to the Hermann Lofts, which the group converted into two large apartments and an office for Minnette Boesel's real-estate business.

"We'd been promoting urban redevelopment for so long that it was time for us to put our money where our mouth was," says Mize. They say they had been attending workshops on possible redevelopment since the '80s. "We've seen more charettes (artist renderings of architecture sketches) than we can remember." Mize recalls that when the Rice deal was announced in 1997, "We thought, 'We're on our way.' "

But things haven't changed as much as they'd like. "We're a little disappointed," says Tidwell. "We thought there would be more retail by now. More of everything, really."

Sure enough, almost no non-bar or non-restaurant retail has opened downtown. And no new housing has been built (though the Shamrock Towers project is supposed to break ground at Texas and Main any day now), and developers are nearly out of historical buildings to rehabilitate.

That points to downtown's crying need — affordable and middle-class housing. Reading is amazed at how cheap downtown Houston is. Renting and buying are about half of what they would cost in downtown Austin, but for most people, even those who crave an urban lifestyle, buying a $400,000 loft is out of the question. And until downtown's population rises dramatically — doubling, at least, to 10,000 — you won't find significant retail there.

"Why isn't there more housing that a nurse working in the Medical Center could afford?" asks urban broker Jeff Kaplan of Wulfe & Co. developers.

The answer is and isn't complicated. Simply put, the dirt is expensive. On the other hand, other cities with equally expensive dirt have found ways to build mixed-income housing. But Kaplan says that Houston hears "mixed-income" and understands "housing projects."

Stuck in the '70s?

In any case, Houston still has plenty of dirt downtown to redevelop. The area around the ballpark, to name just one parking-lot district, remains such a wasteland of surface lots that you expect to find T.S. Eliot taking up the parking at Astros games.

Many property owners cling to the notion that some developer will make them rich by building an office tower on their property. These owners are not being realistic, says Guy Hagstette of the Houston Downtown Management District. "They're stuck in the 1970s, when skyscrapers sprouted out of the Houston gumbo. But in the last 20 years, there have only been five new office buildings (downtown)," Hagstette says. "There will maybe be six lucky landowners whose lots are bought for high-rise development. The rest will either have to hang on to their parking lots or agree to sell for less than dream money. Then middle-class housing can be built."

But in the meantime, how can the city achieve this no-brainer of a goal? Realtors talk about the city's giving tax abatements to encourage developers to pay the asking price for the land. But Hagstette says, "City government has done a hell of a lot," referring to the massive public and private works projects that led up to the Super Bowl. How much more can we ask? He adds, "We (the Downtown Management District) are looking for every idea that doesn't involve public funds."

These ideas often involve corporate help. Maybe corporations that subsidize their employees' parking could take that same money and help employees pay for downtown housing. Maybe some corporations and the city could collaborate to build a public school downtown.

Early Stages

These specific ideas may or may not fly. But they point to Hagstette's main point vis-à-vis downtown. The redevelopment process is in its early stages, and the work to come will take just as much creativity and hard work as has the recent substantial progress. My biggest fear is that people are going to think that now that we have the rail and the hotels and the sports facilities, downtown will take care of itself. It won't.

Still, Hagstette says, he is optimistic. "It's just that this job has taught me to be patient. But the city is too good about responding to the market for (housing and retail development) not to happen."

So yes, the downtown that so many people want so badly is coming, but it will only unfold one block at a time, and the picture may not be complete for another 20 years. I'm happy that downtown is coming back, but I still share in the lament of Tidwell and Mize. We think downtown is going to happen. We're just afraid we're going to be too old to enjoy it.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/headline/features/3002851

It All Depends What You Mean by 'Independent

2005-01-24T06:56:00.000-06:00

January 23, 2005
It All Depends What You Mean by 'Independent'
By RICHARD RUSHFIELD

I SEE now what all the excitement is out here in Santa Monica," the actor Bill Murray said, accepting his 2004 Independent Spirit Award for best actor last February. "For a great number of the people in this room, this is as dressed up as you're going to get all year. And for an equally large number, this is as casually dressed as you're going to be all year."

Off-the-cuff as Mr. Murray's quip seemed to be - he joked that prepared remarks "wouldn't be independent" - it captured something about the Spirit awards, which have become the meeting-place for Hollywood's glamour crowd and low-budget, seat-of-your pants filmmakers. Twenty years after the nonprofit Independent Film Project (I.F.P.) started its low-key annual tribute to indie film, a then-neglected corner of the arts, the Spirits have grown into one of Hollywood's glitziest and quirkiest parties of the awards season. They continue to honor idiosyncratic films made on minuscule budgets - the trophy depicts a bird, representing the independent spirit, wrapped with shoestrings - but fringe filmmakers like Todd Haynes and Errol Morris now share the ceremony with people like Tom Cruise, Lucy Liu and Jennifer Aniston, who were among the awards presenters in 2004. And the show itself now has all the staples of a Hollywood gala: corporate sponsors, five-figure ticket prices, gift bags filled with expensive giveaways and a star-studded red carpet.

In a landscape crowded with televised awards shows, the Spirits, which will be broadcast starting at 5 p.m., Eastern time, on Feb. 26 (the day before the Academy Awards) on Bravo and IFC, has found a niche with a show full of spontaneous fumbling of the sort that the Academy Awards' producers work hard to avoid.

"We want it to feel onstage as though you're getting a glimpse at what's going on backstage," said Diana Zahn-Storey, who has produced the Spirits since 1995.

That let-it-all-hang-out tone was on display at the 2000 ceremony, when the actress Ally Sheedy gave an unhinged 10-minute acceptance speech, gushing about the resurrection of an aging actress in Hollywood and refusing to yield the podium.

The underground film director John Waters, host of the Spirits since 2001 before passing the baton to Samuel L. Jackson this year, described the show's ethos in an interview: "It doesn't have to appeal to mid-America. We're doing it for the niche audience that had seen all the movies, that were supporters of independent films. We don't have to pretend to cross over into an audience that wouldn't watch the show."

To that end, the show is peppered with tongue-in-cheek celebrations of independent film's more alienating qualities, illustrated by a bit performed at the 2002 show by the actors Rachel Griffiths and Alan Cumming; it deplored the small number of people who had sex after watching indie movies like "Donnie Darko" compared with how many had it after going to films like, say, "The Mummy."

But while the Spirit awards have grown into a Hollywood institution, as recently as a decade ago they occupied an obscure corner of the entertainment industry, as did the independent film sector as a whole.

"It was lunchtime" and everyone was getting drunk, Bingham Ray, the former president of the indie powerhouse October Films, recalled of the early gatherings. The producer Christine Vachon ("Far From Heaven"), a Spirits regular since 1990, remembered a chummy get-together where, she said, "everybody drank too much, and there was no press there, so nobody watched what they said."

When Dawn Hudson, a vivacious Arkansas native and former actress and screenwriter, took over as executive director of the I.F.P.'s struggling Los Angeles chapter in 1991, she found herself at the helm of a ceremony more notable for its intoxicated languor than for its glitz or clout. The 1991 show, she recalled, ran four and a half hours and featured a 45-minute keynote address by Francis Ford Coppola. Built around an analogy comparing filmmaking and wine-making, the speech seemed to touch on each and every phase of a vintner's work.

The next day, Ms. Hudson was taken to task over lunch by Kenneth Turan, film critic for The Los Angeles Times, who said that the out-of-control show wasted an opportunity to build support for the organization's independent film services. "You start out with all the good will in the room and you burn it up by the time we leave," she said he told her.

Ms. Hudson, the head of a two-person organization kept afloat by promissory notes from its board members, needed to rein in a show created to celebrate eccentricity and individuality. Over the next few years, the Spirits cut the time-devouring keynote address and pepped up the proceedings with snappy film clips, while trying to preserve space for the sort of gaffes and rhetorical over-reaching that gave the show its atmosphere of indie-world spontaneity. Bleeped-out swear words, for instance, are still common and, Ms. Storey says, presenters are encouraged to ignore the scripts provided them and fumble freely.

The most immediate beneficiary of the show's growth has been the I.F.P., which uses the ceremony as a fund-raiser. Tables cost $10,000 to $40,000 and, Ms. Hudson says, there is an extensive waiting list to buy one, as a presence at the Spirits has become de rigueur for Hollywood's major players. As John Waters described a recent crowd, "Every person who could ever let me make a movie was in that one room."

Overall, the Spirits generate $1.5 million for the I.F.P.'s Los Angeles chapter, a quarter of its $6 million budget (up from a $350,000 budget in 1991). As a result, I.F.P./L.A. is now well past its days of dodging creditors, offering an array of film production and distribution services to the 6,000 members who join for a $90 annual fee.

The I.F.P. also functions as an advocate for independent film. In 2003, when the Academy of Motion Pictures tried to ban the distribution of screeners - privately circulated DVD's of Oscar candidate films - a move many thought would hurt less visible films, the I.F.P. led the lawsuit that forced the academy to back down.

With the Spirits' success, however, has come concern that they no longer serve a beleaguered corner of the entertainment marketplace. Peter Biskind, whose book "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film" (Simon & Schuster, 2004) chronicles the independent film world of the 1990's, said in an interview: "It's pretty clear that the Spirit awards, as they become more and more sophisticated and have gotten more and more attention, have paralleled the Hollywoodization of indie films. I don't think there's anything wrong with the ceremony per se, but they have become mini-Oscars. And that's appropriate, because that's the direction that indie films have gone in anyways."

Much of the grumbling about the Hollywoodization of the Spirits centers on the awards' rather fluid nominating criteria. At first, films were deemed independent based on their sources of financing and had to prove, essentially, that they were free from the taint of studio backing. By the mid-1990's, however, as major studios became interested in financing low-budget films, and independent distributors like October Films and Miramax were bought up by major studios, verifying the fiscal independence of films became increasingly difficult, Ms. Hudson said. "It became kind of ludicrous," she explained. "We had become the financing police to find where money came from."

In 1995, the I.F.P./Los Angeles board scrapped the rigorous formula, replacing it with four criteria: "Original provocative subject matter, uniqueness of vision, economy of means and percentage of independent financing." These serve as rough guidelines that the nominating committee, a group of 15 independent film professionals, use to make their decisions.

If a film falls short on one or more of these, though, the judges are free to overlook it. For instance, this year's committee set a budget cap in the $15 million range, but "Sideways," the film receiving the most nominations, exceeded that total with a budget estimated at $17.5 million.

Decisions like these, Ms. Hudson says, arise out of the committee's grappling for a definition of what independent film really is.

"There's a lot of discussion about the subject matter," she said. "The feeling about 'Sideways' was it was so independent in its vision, the fact that it has a slightly higher budget still warranted including it."

In addition to "Sideways," the 2004 best feature nominees include two relatively high-exposure films - "Kinsey" and "Maria Full of Grace" - as well as "Primer" and "Baadasssss!," whose combined box office tally is less than $1 million.

Once the nominees are chosen, voting is open to the entire I.F.P. membership, whose past choices have provoked further grumbling from some indie filmmakers. Since 1994, an analysis of box-office figures reveals, the best feature award has been won by the highest-grossing nominee, a pattern that will continue this year if the favorite, "Sideways," wins.

Ms. Hudson conceded, "It's never really a level playing field when you have tons of marketing dollars being spent on some of the films and very few marketing dollars spent on others, and you have some films that are in the theaters for a long time and others that are in and out."

But, she said, the I.F.P. was trying to even things up through a new arrangement with Netflix, the DVD-by-mail service, to lend copies of nominated films to I.F.P. members.

Sardonic, quirky and low budget though the Independent Spirit Awards may be, the show has become a part of the annual awards industry, and with that comes accompanying baggage.

"It isn't anxiety free anymore," Mr. Waters said. "People want to win just as much as they want to win the Oscar." In independent film, "people have to pretend a little bit that they don't care," he continued. "But everybody cares. Or else it wouldn't be important.

The Crafty Attacks on Evolution

2005-01-24T06:53:00.000-06:00

January 23, 2005
EDITORIAL
The Crafty Attacks on Evolution

Critics of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution become more wily with each passing year. Creationists who believe that God made the world and everything in it pretty much as described in the Bible were frustrated when their efforts to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools or inject the teaching of creationism were judged unconstitutional by the courts. But over the past decade or more a new generation of critics has emerged with a softer, more roundabout approach that they hope can pass constitutional muster.

One line of attack - on display in Cobb County, Ga., in recent weeks - is to discredit evolution as little more than a theory that is open to question. Another strategy - now playing out in Dover, Pa. - is to make students aware of an alternative theory called "intelligent design," which infers the existence of an intelligent agent without any specific reference to God. These new approaches may seem harmless to a casual observer, but they still constitute an improper effort by religious advocates to impose their own slant on the teaching of evolution.
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The Cobb County fight centers on a sticker that the board inserted into a new biology textbook to placate opponents of evolution. The school board, to its credit, was trying to strengthen the teaching of evolution after years in which it banned study of human origins in the elementary and middle schools and sidelined the topic as an elective in high school, in apparent violation of state curriculum standards. When the new course of study raised hackles among parents and citizens (more than 2,300 signed a petition), the board sought to quiet the controversy by placing a three-sentence sticker in the textbooks:

"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."

Although the board clearly thought this was a reasonable compromise, and many readers might think it unexceptional, it is actually an insidious effort to undermine the science curriculum. The first sentence sounds like a warning to parents that the film they are about to watch with their children contains pornography. Evolution is so awful that the reader must be warned that it is discussed inside the textbook. The second sentence makes it sound as though evolution is little more than a hunch, the popular understanding of the word "theory," whereas theories in science are carefully constructed frameworks for understanding a vast array of facts. The National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific organization, has declared evolution "one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have" and says it is supported by an overwhelming scientific consensus.

The third sentence, urging that evolution be studied carefully and critically, seems like a fine idea. The only problem is, it singles out evolution as the only subject so shaky it needs critical judgment. Every subject in the curriculum should be studied carefully and critically. Indeed, the interpretations taught in history, economics, sociology, political science, literature and other fields of study are far less grounded in fact and professional consensus than is evolutionary biology.

A more honest sticker would describe evolution as the dominant theory in the field and an extremely fruitful scientific tool. The sad fact is, the school board, in its zeal to be accommodating, swallowed the language of the anti-evolution crowd. Although the sticker makes no mention of religion and the school board as a whole was not trying to advance religion, a federal judge in Georgia ruled that the sticker amounted to an unconstitutional endorsement of religion because it was rooted in long-running religious challenges to evolution. In particular, the sticker's assertion that "evolution is a theory, not a fact" adopted the latest tactical language used by anti-evolutionists to dilute Darwinism, thereby putting the school board on the side of religious critics of evolution. That court decision is being appealed. Supporters of sound science education can only hope that the courts, and school districts, find a way to repel this latest assault on the most well-grounded theory in modern biology.
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In the Pennsylvania case, the school board went further and became the first in the nation to require, albeit somewhat circuitously, that attention be paid in school to "intelligent design." This is the notion that some things in nature, such as the workings of the cell and intricate organs like the eye, are so complex that they could not have developed gradually through the force of Darwinian natural selection acting on genetic variations. Instead, it is argued, they must have been designed by some sort of higher intelligence. Leading expositors of intelligent design accept that the theory of evolution can explain what they consider small changes in a species over time, but they infer a designer's hand at work in what they consider big evolutionary jumps.

The Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania became the first in the country to place intelligent design before its students, albeit mostly one step removed from the classroom. Last week school administrators read a brief statement to ninth-grade biology classes (the teachers refused to do it) asserting that evolution was a theory, not a fact, that it had gaps for which there was no evidence, that intelligent design was a differing explanation of the origin of life, and that a book on intelligent design was available for interested students, who were, of course, encouraged to keep an open mind. That policy, which is being challenged in the courts, suffers from some of the same defects found in the Georgia sticker. It denigrates evolution as a theory, not a fact, and adds weight to that message by having administrators deliver it aloud.
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Districts around the country are pondering whether to inject intelligent design into science classes, and the constitutional problems are underscored by practical issues. There is little enough time to discuss mainstream evolution in most schools; the Dover students get two 90-minute classes devoted to the subject. Before installing intelligent design in the already jam-packed science curriculum, school boards and citizens need to be aware that it is not a recognized field of science. There is no body of research to support its claims nor even a real plan to conduct such research. In 2002, more than a decade after the movement began, a pioneer of intelligent design lamented that the movement had many sympathizers but few research workers, no biology texts and no sustained curriculum to offer educators. Another leading expositor told a Christian magazine last year that the field had no theory of biological design to guide research, just "a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions." If evolution is derided as "only a theory," intelligent design needs to be recognized as "not even a theory" or "not yet a theory." It should not be taught or even described as a scientific alternative to one of the crowning theories of modern science.

That said, in districts where evolution is a burning issue, there ought to be some place in school where the religious and cultural criticisms of evolution can be discussed, perhaps in a comparative religion class or a history or current events course. But school boards need to recognize that neither creationism nor intelligent design is an alternative to Darwinism as a scientific explanation of the evolution of life.

Sex Ed at Harvard

2005-01-23T11:41:00.000-06:00

January 23, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Sex Ed at Harvard
By CHARLES MURRAY

Washington

FORTY-SIX years ago, in "The Two Cultures," C. P. Snow famously warned of the dangers when communication breaks down between the sciences and the humanities. The reaction to remarks by Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, about the differences between men and women was yet another sign of a breakdown that takes Snow's worries to a new level: the wholesale denial that certain bodies of scientific knowledge exist.

Mr. Summers's comments, at a supposedly off-the-record gathering, were mild. He offered, as an interesting though unproved possibility, that innate sex differences might explain why so few women are on science and engineering faculties, and he told a story about how nature seemed to trump nurture in his own daughter.

To judge from the subsequent furor, one might conclude that Mr. Summers was advancing a radical idea backed only by personal anecdotes and a fringe of cranks. In truth, it's the other way around. If you were to query all the scholars who deal professionally with data about the cognitive repertoires of men and women, all but a fringe would accept that the sexes are different, and that genes are clearly implicated.

How our genetic makeup is implicated remains largely unknown, but our geneticists and neuroscientists are doing a great deal of work to unravel the story. When David C. Geary's landmark book "Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences" was published in 1998, the bibliography of technical articles ran to 52 pages - and that was seven years ago. Hundreds if not thousands of articles have been published since.

This scholarship shows a notable imbalance, however: scholarship on the environmental sources of male-female differences tends to be stale (wade through a recent assessment of 172 studies of gender differences in parenting involving 28,000 children, and you will discover that two-thirds of the boys were discouraged from playing with dolls - but were nurtured pretty much the same as girls in every other way); but scholarship about innate male-female differences has the vibrancy and excitement of an important new field gaining momentum. A recent notable example is "The Essential Difference," published in 2003 by Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University, which presents a grand unified theory of male and female cognition that may well be a historic breakthrough.

"Exciting" is the right word for this work, not "threatening" or "scary." We may not know the answers yet, but we can be confident that they will be more interesting than, say, a discrete gene for science that clicks on for men differently than it does for women. Rather, it will be a story of the interaction of many male and female genetic differences, and the way a person's environment affects those differences. Hardly any of the answers will lend themselves to simplistic verdicts of "males are better" or vice versa. For every time there is such a finding favoring males, there will be another favoring females.

Some people will find the results threatening - because some people find any group differences threatening - but such fears will be misplaced. We may find that innate differences give men, as a group, an edge over women, as a group, in producing, say, terrific mathematicians. But knowing that fact about the group difference will not change another fact: that some women are terrific mathematicians. The proportions of men and women mathematicians may never be equal, but who cares? What's important is that all women with the potential to become terrific mathematicians have full opportunity to do so.

Of course, new knowledge will not be without costs. Perhaps knowing that there is a group difference will discourage some women from even trying to become mathematicians or engineers or circus clowns. We - scientists, parents, educators, employers - must do everything we can to prevent such unwarranted reactions. And the best way to do that is to put the individual's abilities, not group membership, at the center of our attention.

Against the cost of the new knowledge is the far greater cost of obliviousness, which can lead us to pursue policies that try to make society conform to expectations that conflict with what human beings really are. In the study of gender, large and growing bodies of good science are helping us understand the sources of human abilities and limitations. It is time to accept their existence, their seriousness and their legitimacy.

Charles Murray is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Different but (Probably) Equal

2005-01-23T11:36:00.000-06:00

January 23, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Different but (Probably) Equal
By OLIVIA JUDSON

London — HYPOTHESIS: males and females are typically indistinguishable on the basis of their behaviors and intellectual abilities.

This is not true for elephants. Females have big vocabularies and hang out in herds; males tend to live in solitary splendor, and insofar as they speak at all, their conversation appears mostly to consist of elephant for "I'm in the mood, I'm in the mood..."

The hypothesis is not true for zebra finches. Males sing elaborate songs. Females can't sing at all. A zebra finch opera would have to have males in all the singing roles.

And it's not true for green spoon worms. This animal, which lives on the sea floor, has one of the largest known size differences between male and female: the male is 200,000 times smaller. He spends his whole life in her reproductive tract, fertilizing eggs by regurgitating sperm through his mouth. He's so different from his mate that when he was first discovered by science, he was not recognized as being a green spoon worm; instead, he was thought to be a parasite.

Is it ridiculous to suppose that the hypothesis might not be true for humans either?

No. But it is not fashionable - as Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, discovered when he suggested this month that greater intrinsic ability might be one reason that men are overrepresented at the top levels of fields involving math, science and engineering.

There are - as the maladroit Mr. Summers should have known - good reasons it's not fashionable. Beliefs that men are intrinsically better at this or that have repeatedly led to discrimination and prejudice, and then they've been proved to be nonsense. Women were thought not to be world-class musicians. But when American symphony orchestras introduced blind auditions in the 1970's - the musician plays behind a screen so that his or her gender is invisible to those listening - the number of women offered jobs in professional orchestras increased.

Similarly, in science, studies of the ways that grant applications are evaluated have shown that women are more likely to get financing when those reading the applications do not know the sex of the applicant. In other words, there's still plenty of work to do to level the playing field; there's no reason to suppose there's something inevitable about the status quo.

All the same, it seems a shame if we can't even voice the question. Sex differences are fascinating - and entirely unlike the other biological differences that distinguish other groups of living things (like populations and species). Sex differences never arise in isolation, with females evolving on a mountaintop, say, and males evolving in a cave. Instead, most genes - and in some species, all genes - spend equal time in each sex. Many sex differences are not, therefore, the result of his having one gene while she has another. Rather, they are attributable to the way particular genes behave when they find themselves in him instead of her.

The magnificent difference between male and female green spoon worms, for example, has nothing to do with their having different genes: each green spoon worm larva could go either way. Which sex it becomes depends on whether it meets a female during its first three weeks of life. If it meets a female, it becomes male and prepares to regurgitate; if it doesn't, it becomes female and settles into a crack on the sea floor.

What's more, the fact that most genes occur in both males and females can generate interesting sexual tensions. In male fruit flies, for instance, variants of genes that confer particular success - which on Mother Nature's abacus is the number of descendants you have - tend to be detrimental when they occur in females, and vice versa. Worse: the bigger the advantage in one sex, the more detrimental those genes are in the other. This means that, at least for fruit flies, the same genes that make a male a Don Juan would also turn a female into a wallflower; conversely, the genes that make a female a knockout babe would produce a clumsy fellow with the sex appeal of a cake tin.

But why do sex differences appear at all? They appear when the secret of success differs for males and females: the more divergent the paths to success, the more extreme the physiological differences. Peacocks have huge tails and strut about because peahens prefer males with big tails. Bull elephant seals grow to five times the mass of females because big males are better at monopolizing the beaches where the females haul out to have sex and give birth.

Meanwhile, the crow-like jackdaw has (as far as we can tell) no obvious sex differences and appears to lead a life of devoted monogamy. Here, what works for him also seems to work for her, though the female is more likely to sit on the eggs. So by studying the differences - and similarities - among men and women, we can potentially learn about the forces that have shaped us in the past.

And I think the news is good. We're not like green spoon worms or elephant seals, with males and females so different that aspiring to an egalitarian society would be ludicrous. And though we may not be jackdaws either - men and women tend to look different, though even here there's overlap - it's obvious that where there are intellectual differences, they are so slight they cannot be prejudged.

The interesting questions are, is there an average intrinsic difference? And how extensive is the variation? I would love to know if the averages are the same but the underlying variation is different - with members of one sex tending to be either superb or dreadful at particular sorts of thinking while members of the other are pretty good but rarely exceptional.

Curiously, such a result could arise even if the forces shaping men and women have been identical. In some animals - humans and fruit flies come to mind - males have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome while females have two X's. In females, then, extreme effects of genes on one X chromosome can be offset by the genes on the other. But in males, there's no hiding your X. In birds and butterflies, though, it's the other way around: females have a Z chromosome and a W chromosome, and males snooze along with two Z's.

The science of sex differences, even in fruit flies and toads, is a ferociously complex subject. It's also famously fraught, given its malignant history. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when I would have balked at the whole enterprise: the idea there might be intrinsic cognitive differences between men and women was one I found insulting. But science is a great persuader. The jackdaws and spoon worms have forced me to change my mind. Now I'm keen to know what sets men and women apart - and no longer afraid of what we may find.

Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex."

A Bunch of Krabby Patties

2005-01-23T11:22:00.000-06:00

January 23, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Bunch of Krabby Patties
By MAUREEN DOWD

I should have known.

I can't believe I thought he was just an innocent little sponge wearing tight shorts.

What in the name of Davy Jones's locker would a sponge be doing holding hands with a starfish or donning purple and hot-pink flowered garb to redecorate the Krusty Krab if he weren't a perverted invertebrate?

Before this is over, we're going to find out that SpongeBob is the illicit spawn of the Tampa shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge. Who knew SpongeBob would become as fraught as the cover of "Abbey Road"?

It took Dr. James Dobson, the conservative Christian leader and gay marriage opponent, who claims the president's re-election was more a mandate for his ideas than George Bush's, to point out the insidious underside of the popular cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. It takes a sponge to brainwash a child.

Holy Abe! Dr. Dobson outed SpongeBob at a black-tie inaugural fete last week for members of Congress and political allies. He said that a "pro-homosexual video" - starring SpongeBob, Barney, Jimmy Neutron, Winnie the Pooh, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy - was set to go to elementary schools to promote a "tolerance pledge," including tolerance for differences of "sexual identity."

Hoppin' clams, as they say in Bikini Bottom, the den of epicene iniquity where SpongeBob lives. Nothing good can come of tolerance.

Dan Martinsen, a spokesman for Nickelodeon, where SpongeBob beats the pants off the competition, was flummoxed: "It's a sponge, for crying out loud. He has no sexuality."

Dr. Dobson has done the country a service by reminding us to watch out for the dark side of lovable but malleable sponges. He inspired me to fish through the president's Inaugural Address with a more skeptical eye.

Mr. Bush's epic pledge to support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and to end "tyranny in our world" may seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, given that the Iraq vortex has drained our military.

Although his incendiary speech about "the untamed fire of freedom" has been widely interpreted as a code-red warning to both foes and friends, I wonder if the president knew he was literally promising to stamp out undemocratic governments across the globe, which would include some of our top allies. He probably thought it was a fancier way of repackaging the Iraq invasion, not as a failed search for W.M.D., but as a blow for freedom (a word used 27 times) and liberty (used 15 times).

I wonder if W. is surprised that people took it literally. The Bushes don't always understand that they're being held to their rhetoric in major speeches. (Read my warships.) For such a brass-knuckled vision, the president's delivery was curiously unemotional.

Some of the same advisers who filled Mr. Bush's brain with sugary visions of a quick and painless Iraq makeover did mean the speech to be literal; they are drawing up military options for the rest of the Middle East. Once again, the lovable and malleable president seems to be soaking up the martial mind-set of those around him, almost like ... a sponge.

SpongeBush SquarePants!

We can only hope that Dr. Dobson doesn't pick up on the resemblance. SpongeBob, as his song goes, "lives in a pineapple under the sea/absorbent and yellow and porous is he!" SpongeBush lives in a bubble in D.C./absorbent and shallow and porous is he!

SpongeBush ensnared the country in a whale of a mess in Iraq because he guilelessly absorbed the neocons' dire warnings about Saddam's weapons capabilities and their rosy assumptions about Ahmad Chalabi's leadership capabilities.

Dick Cheney is a gruff Mr. Krabs taskmaster to SpongeBush, but SpongeBush is crazy about him anyhow. W. trustingly let his vice president make the worst-case scenario about Iraq a first-case scenario.

Mr. Bush might have thought he was just blowing pretty bubbles full of lofty ideals about freedom and liberty in his speech, but Mr. Cheney and the neocons seem intent on filleting Iran and Syria. (Doesn't Richard Perle remind you of the snarky and pretentious next-door neighbor to SpongeBob, Squidward Tentacles?)

The vice president told Don Imus that Iran was "right at the top of the list" of trouble spots, and that Israel "might well decide to act first" with a military strike.

Even if he's a little light in the flippers, SpongeBob has brought children good, clean fun. SpongeBush has brought the world dark, endless fights.

Today's News

2005-01-21T18:08:00.000-06:00

Newspaper Film Reviews

January 21, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW | 'HEAD-ON'
Two Misplaced Souls Decide They Might as Well Live
By MANOHLA DARGIS

Birol Unel and his bride, Sibel Kekilli, in "Head-On," a German film set among immigrants in the gritty reaches of working-class Hamburg.

Article

Jan. 21, 2005, 11:09AM
'Sideways' puts vino in cinematic spotlight
By MICHAEL LONSFORD
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Article

Jan. 20, 2005, 6:26PM
Fear and Trembling is light and intense
By A.O. SCOTT
New York Times

The Cinema Guild
Amelie (Sylvie Testud) serves tea in Fear and Trembling.

Article

Gay And Lesbian News

If We Crash -- I Will Survive!
Gay guys and lesbian gals like to go down, but they'll be going up -- in style! -- if Houstonian Guy Felder has his way. He and a friend are starting an air charter service called Fabulair, which aims to be to gays what HootersAir is to pathetic businessmen.

The idea started out as an e-mail spoof, but Felder (VP of marketing and officer of On-the-Ground Fabulousness) became convinced it could really work.

"We want to have the perception of a fun airline," says the 26-year-old University of Houston student. "We're not intending to fly bordellos…Our flights are not going to be sex orgies; there will be no drugs, none of that."

There will be drag-queen fashion shows, mid-flight seat switches and movies like Mommie Dearest. (Gee, couldn't they have named the thing Stereotype Airlines?)

Details are still being worked out -- which is entrepreneur-speak for "Believe it when you see it" -- but Felder hopes to start offering flights by August.

"We want to make getting there half the fun," he says.

You are now free to move about the cabin…girlfriend!
Jan. 21, 2005, 10:41AM
Video with SpongeBob alarms Christian group
Reuters News Service

Chronicle file
SpongeBob SquarePants in his Nickelodeon Channel television show.
Article

Houston News

January 21, 2005
Moving In on New York Laps
By MICHAEL BRICK

Article

January 21, 2005
Clemens to Become Highest Paid Pitcher Ever
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Article

Computers

January 20, 2005
STATE OF THE ART
New Ways to Manage Your Photos
By DAVID POGUE

Article

When Bloggers Make News
As Their Clout Increases,
Web Diarists Are Asking:
Just What Are the Rules?

By JESSICA MINTZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 21, 2005; Page B1

Article

GloThong

2005-01-12T19:42:00.000-06:00

ANDREW INNERARITY / Chronicle
THAT'S RIGHT, IT'S RECHARGEABLE: Beau Carpenter shows off his GloThong.

Nov. 27, 2004, 9:17PM
Night light, bright light
By JOY SEWING
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

ANDREW INNERARITY / Chronicle
THAT'S RIGHT, IT'S RECHARGEABLE: Beau Carpenter shows off his GloThong.
They call it the GloThong.

For $49.95 you get a thong that lights up the derriere and almost everything around it for at least two hours. It's water-resistant and comes with a battery wall adapter, or you can buy a car charger similar to those used for cell phones.

You laugh. So did I.

What makes it even more outrageous is that GloThong is the idea of Beau Carpenter, who works at NASA and is an MBA student at Rice University. The avid runner had wanted to create luminescent jogging apparel, but he got sidetracked after finding a slew of thongs on the Internet.

"Why not make a thong that glows in the dark?" he thought.

So Carpenter rounded up his posse -- fellow Rice cohorts Chris Harris, an electrical engineering student, and Marcus Brocato, a chemistry lab manager who works with Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley -- to develop GloThong.

Geeks gone wild? Not really. According to Carpenter, they are just guys trying to make a buck off thongs.

"Being guys, it didn't take us long to gravitate to them," says Carpenter, who gets a laugh every time he mentions the product. "My co-workers find it endlessly entertaining."

The men believe their invention is a hot twist on a fashion classic and hope to develop bras, swimsuits, scuba gear and maybe even dog collars.

To test out GloThong, they took their product to a Dickinson topless bar. "The women liked the product so much that they lined up to give us their real names and cell numbers," Carpenter said.

They also suggested that the battery be moved to the front of the thong for more comfort.

The suggestion made me wonder about the car charger. Can you actually recharge your thong while driving?

"I would not recommend driving and recharging at the same time," Carpenter says, laughing. "It's really meant to be recharged off of the body."

The men are anxious to get GloThong off the ground and hope women, and even men, will recognize the benefit of owning such a product.

"We're selling attention," Carpenter says, noting that the product shines like neon and comes in a rainbow of colors.

"You kind of feel like Cinderella until the Glo runs out."

The product will be ready by Christmas and can be ordered online at www.glothong.com.

Modern Love for Ancient Vines in Southern Italy

2005-01-12T19:39:00.000-06:00

Luca Vignelli for The New York Times
PAMPERED BARRELS The sleek new cellar of Feudi di San Gregorio in Campania, Italy.

January 12, 2005
Modern Love for Ancient Vines in Southern Italy
By ERIC ASIMOV

SORBO SERPICO, Italy

ROLLING hills carpeted with vineyards surround this tiny village in the Irpinia region of Campania here in southern Italy, where the landscape has hardly changed for centuries. Then it hits your eye, a sleek structure of glass, brushed steel and concrete, Feudi di San Gregorio's new $25 million winery and hospitality center, as likely a feature of this countryside as an alien spaceship.

Huge diesel buses, miles from the tourist centers of Naples and the Amalfi coast, idle in the parking lot, awaiting the scores of German and Dutch visitors who are touring the building, which was designed by the Japanese architect Hikaru Mori, who lives in Milan. Perhaps the tourists have descended into the chaste white earthquake-resistant cellar, where thousands of barrels are soothed around the clock by 16th-century madrigals written by Carlo Gesualdo, an Irpinian composer infamous for having murdered his wife. Maybe they are sitting in the glass-enclosed tasting room, in sculptured chairs of soft leather. Or maybe they have descended on Marennà, a modern restaurant that has already won wide acclaim for its refined dining.

It's a huge change for Campania, which for centuries has been a viticultural backwater in a country that is an ocean of wine. While the world discovered the great wines of northern Italy, the Barolos and Barbarescos of Piedmont, and the Brunellos and modern blends of Tuscany, Campania and the rest of the south was given little thought. The prosperous, industrialized northern Italians have always dismissed the southerners' rustic wines, made from unknown indigenous grapes.

But Campania and the south have never accepted the north's version of the truth. And in the last decade the rapid pace of progress has transformed Campania and its neighboring province of Basilicata into the most exciting winemaking areas in Italy. And unlike the north, which initially attracted attention with wines made from French varietals like cabernet sauvignon and merlot, Campania is doing it with grapes that were growing in the region even before Vesuvius buried Pompeii.

Crisp, mineral-laden whites, made from grapes that can be traced back to ancient Greece, belie the image of Italian white wines as mere thirst quenchers. Fascinating reds are being produced from grapes so obscure they cannot be found in even the latest wine guides. Most important, though, are the fine red wines made from aglianico (pronounced ah-lee-ahn-EE-co), another grape with origins in ancient Greece.

Like nebbiolo, the grape of Barolo, aglianico can be tough and tannic, with flavors reminiscent of tar and tobacco. But it softens faster and, like pinot noir, the aromas and flavors of aglianico differ markedly depending on the soil and climate in which it grows. North of Naples in the Falerno area near the Tyrrhenian coast, aglianico has a full, earthy, almost floral character. To the south, around the ancient Greek settlement of Paestum, the wines seem tighter, with a light smokiness and herbal quality. Inland in the Taurasi zone, where aglianico is planted on the foothills of the Apennine mountains, and in Basilicata, where vines grow on the slopes of Mount Vulture (pronounced vul-TOUR-ay), the wines are structured and complex, with minerality that comes from volcanic soil.

"I consider aglianico with nebbiolo probably the most important Italian indigenous varietals," said Riccardo Cotarella, an oenologist who has worked with some of Campania's most important winemakers.

Feudi di San Gregorio, one of Mr. Cotarella's clients, is the best financed and perhaps the most innovative of the south's newer winemakers. But while its new facility is a striking addition to the Campanian countryside, Feudi's high-spending approach is far from ordinary. The most exciting new producers in Campania and Basilicata characteristically come from farm families that have grown grapes for centuries. These families typically sold their grapes for meager prices to big producers, to be made into cheap wine. In tough economic times, when grape prices went down, these families struggled even more than usual.

"We had to try something else," said Salvatore Fucci, whose vineyard is in the heart of the Vulture area in Basilicata. "Growing grapes, we couldn't live. Necessity forced us to do this." With barely enough financing, Mr. Fucci and his family went into the winemaking business. The estate's first commercial vintage, 2000, was released under the label Elena Fucci, named for Mr. Fucci's daughter, who is studying winemaking in Pisa. He has received good reviews, though not good enough for Mr. Fucci to feel comfortable in his new life.

"We're not Tuscan," he said. "Here, things assume another dimension. We worry about bad things. The weather. We used to have to pay people to take our grapes."

The litany of landowners turned winemakers seemed endless: Fattoria Galardi, whose austere, complex Terra di Lavoro wines have been rapturously praised by Robert M. Parker Jr., the influential wine critic; De Conciliis and Luigi Maffini along the southern coast; Antonio Caggiano in Taurasi and Villa Raiano in Avellino; Salvatore Molettieri in Irpinia; Masseria Felicia near Caserta. They all began making wine in the 1990's after decades if not centuries of growing grapes.

"In Caserta 10 years ago there were 5 estates; now there are 28," said Nicola Trabucco, an agronomist who counts 15 properties in northern Campania among his clients. "In Benevento there are 50 new estates in the last five years."

Before the avalanche of new producers, one winemaker, Mastroberardino, held the torch high for Campania. Since 1878 Mastroberardino has been producing fine red wines from aglianico and whites from grapes like greco, fiano and falanghina. Almost alone it carefully tended the traditions, asserting a place for the wines that the rest of the world seemed to spurn.

"There is a strong conviction that we have an extraordinary patrimony," said Piero Mastroberardino, who runs the winery with his father, Antonio. "Twenty years ago maybe one or two wineries were making Taurasi. Now there are 30 or 40."

For elegance and complexity, few wines in Campania can match Mastroberardino's Taurasi Radici, a tar- and mineral-flavored wine that, like Barolo or Burgundy, can take on the aroma of truffles as it ages and can last for decades. Because Campania was ignored for so long, it is still catching up with the scientific advances that are taken for granted in most of the modern winemaking world. Grapes like chardonnay, pinot noir and cabernet have been thoroughly analyzed, allowing farmers to select clones and rootstocks best suited for particular combinations of soil and climate. But scientists have barely scratched the surface on the grapes of Campania.

"Research on aglianico has been going on for a few years," Mr. Mastroberardino said, "but for greco, fiano and the others, it is just beginning."

The transition from small grower to grower-producer has occurred all over the wine-producing world as farmers have figured out where the money is. But it's happening in Campania and Basilicata decades after regions like Piedmont, which went through its own shakeout in the 1960's and 70's. In Campania growers saw what happened in the mid-1990's, when Mr. Parker raved about new estates like Galardi and Montevetrano, which have since become the equivalent of cult wineries. But government loans and subsidies, available in the 1990's for existing farms, also encouraged growers to improve vineyards and cellars with new vines and new equipment, and to start bottling their own wine.

Typically for this land of contrasts, where the undulating pastoral beauty of olive groves and tobacco fields is defiled by slag heaps alongside mountains that have been gouged to make cement, the loans that helped so many in the last decade are squeezing these new producers, who must now repay the money they borrowed. With the slower economy, many of these wineries are facing frightening choices.

"Many new estates, with good potential, don't have the resources to wait out a bad market," Mr. Trabucco, the agronomist, said. "You need two or three years' investment to carry you through. They don't have it, so they look for an immediate return."

By that they mean high scores from influential critics who can cause a run on a particular wine. Many producers, believing that Mr. Parker's publication, The Wine Advocate, favors inky, powerful, concentrated wines with plenty of new oak flavor, try to make wines in that style, often at the expense of aglianico's characteristic medium body and earthy flavors.

Many winemakers were inspired by the success of Montevetrano, in southern Campania, which was started by Silvia Imparato, a photographer who caught the wine bug in the mid-1980's. With the help of Mr. Cotarella and his brother, Renzo, a winemaker for Antinori in Tuscany, she made 1,000 bottles of her first vintage, 1991. She had wanted to make a wine purely of aglianico, she said, but Mr. Cotarella, who is from Umbria, refused. Instead, Mr. Cotarella, who had made his reputation working with Bordeaux varietals, insisted on 60 percent cabernet sauvignon, 30 percent merlot and 10 percent aglianico.

"In the beginning I didn't trust this region, because there weren't any important wines," Mr. Cotarella says now. Ms. Imparato's wines, plummy yet light-bodied, with scents of cedar and tobacco, are now sought all over the world.

Several years after he began with Montevetrano, Mr. Cotarella began working with Galardi and with Feudi di San Gregorio. With Galardi, he makes one of Campania's most profound wines, Terra di Lavoro, out of aglianico and piedirosso, an indigenous grape that is often blended with aglianico.

"Montevetrano showed me the potential of the region, and Galardi showed me the potential of the indigenous grapes," he said. "Both represent what it can mean to work in the region with the right philosophy, the right terroir and the right varietals."

Montevetrano, with its use of familiar international grapes like cabernet and merlot, is practically unique in Campania. Recently Mr. Cotarella recommended to another client, Alois, that it rip out its small plot of cabernet and instead plant casavecchia, an obscure, ancient red grape that is only now being studied.

Alois, near Caserta, complied and now makes a silky, minerally 100 percent casavecchia, which it calls Trebulanum. Another producer, Vestini Campagnano, specializes in little-known indigenous grapes like casavecchia and pallagrello, which in its bianco form makes soft, supple white, and in its nero form makes powerhouse reds. By many estimates the older vineyards of Campania and Basilicata hold dozens of grape varieties waiting to be rediscovered.

Back at Feudi di San Gregorio, Mr. Cotarella is working on a new project, sparkling wine. Almost every region of Italy produces spumante, though Campania has yet to create a market for its own. Mr. Cotarella has enlisted as an adviser Anselme Selosse, winemaker of Jacques Selosse, a small but important Champagne house, but Mr. Selosse will not be coming to teach the Italians about chardonnay and pinot noir. Instead they will be making sparkling wine with greco, falanghina and fiano.

"The French people," Mr. Cotarella said with relish, "they are very jealous!"

Jewish films examine immigration and identity

2005-01-12T19:04:00.000-06:00

Maurice Schwartz (center) in Tevye
photo: Steidl

Homeland Insecurity
The whole megillah: Crossing the globe, Jewish films examine immigration and identity

"It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home," Theodor Adorno wrote during World War II, while exiled from his native Germany in Los Angeles. For Jews—subject to centuries of persecution and dispossession, or having put down roots amid an unstable Middle East—a sense of displacement appears central to their identity. Many of the entries in this year's New York Jewish Film Festival (organized by the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center) feature Jewish characters struggling humorously or tragically with the idea of home, a concept that repeatedly eludes them.

Consider the case of Ariel Makaroff (Daniel Hendler), antihero of Argentine director Daniel Burman's bittersweet comedy Lost Embrace (opening for a commercial run on January 28). Ariel spends most of his time loitering in the Buenos Aires mall where his older brother works as a shmatte salesman and his mother runs a lingerie boutique left to them by his father, who abandoned the family for life in Israel shortly after Ariel's birth.

Longing to emigrate, Ariel enlists the help of his grandmother, a Yiddish songstress with a Polish passport, in order to become a "European." Along the way, he uncovers some messy family secrets. The great charm of Burman's film lies not in its loose plot, but rather in its portrait of Jewish life amid the crumbling Argentine economy—where nothing sells, and the rabbi himself is leaving for Miami—as something suspended in time and permanently provisional.

"My homeland is where my legs are standing," director Daniel Blaufuks quotes his grandfather as saying in Under Strange Skies, a film essay about Jewish emigration to Lisbon during World War II, when the city served as a waiting room for those fleeing Hitler's march across Europe. Blaufuks's grandparents, German Jews, arrived in 1936; later, as many as 200,000 other refugees passed through, killing time while awaiting visas and passages to the New World. (Only a handful, including the director's family, stayed on after the war.) This compelling documentary weaves together home movies, archival footage, and quotes from refugees' writings to portray the overheated and anxious milieu of a city at the edge of a vast conflagration. It also conjures the uncanny sense of exile that lingered long after the conflict had ended.

The distinguished writer Amos Elon left his native Vienna for Palestine in 1933; his American-born wife, Beth, joined him in Israel in the 1960s. Their daughter Danae's documentary, Another Road Home, follows her search for Musa Obeidallah, the Palestinian man her parents hired to look after her as a child. The journey leads her from Paterson, New Jersey, where Musa's sons have immigrated, back to Battir, his village on the West Bank, and through complex and competing memories of family and home. To her credit, Danae Elon keeps the discomfort level rather high, but her film is marred by her seemingly unquestioned acceptance of her father's negativism regarding the future of the Jewish state. He is, after all, not the only authority on this subject, and it seems a bit too easy, near the end of one's life, to decide the game is over for everyone.

British director Paul Morrison appears to specialize in tales of Jewish longing for the gentile world. (His Solomon and Gaenor was a Romeo and Juliet story in Welsh and Yiddish.) Wondrous Oblivion, his latest, follows the adventures of David Wiseman, the 11-year-old son of Polish-Jewish refugees in south London, who adores cricket but lacks the skills to compete until his newly arrived Jamaican neighbor (Delroy Lindo) starts to coach him. The year is 1960—racial tensions run high, but David and his neighbor's daughter are soon trading mangoes and bagels. Still, the real love story here is between a boy and his sport. Wondrous Oblivion veers perilously close to cliché, but it's redeemed by fine performances and the warmth of its characters.

And speaking of Jewish longing for the gentile world, remember Tevye the milkman, whose faith is sorely tested by his daughter's love for a Ukrainian intellectual? Those put off by the thought of Alfred Molina in Fiddler on the Roof might try Tevye, Yiddish theater star and director Maurice Schwartz's 1939 version of the Sholem Aleichem classic, in which he plays the earthy and long-suffering dairyman of Boyberik with just the right mixture of irony and compassion.

Tevye ends with the milkman's family and his goat heading off for the Holy Land under the shadow of European persecution. Meanwhile, most of Hollywood, on the eve of World War II, remained willfully ignorant of Germany's threat. Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, a rather plodding documentary on a rich subject, is strongest while detailing the early years of denial by Jewish studio executives, who feared appearing partisan if they made anti-German films, and the immediate post-war era, when television took more risks, like the episode of This Is Your Life that featured an Auschwitz survivor. But director Daniel Anker poses no uncomfortable questions about the current proliferation of Holocaust-themed films—more, we are meant to assume, is simply better. And in the end, alas, all roads lead uncritically to Schindler's List.

Train to J.F.K. Scores With Fliers, but Not With Airport Workers

2005-01-12T19:02:00.000-06:00

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The AirTrain links terminals at Kennedy Airport and connects with rail stations.

January 12, 2005
Train to J.F.K. Scores With Fliers, but Not With Airport Workers
By SEWELL CHAN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - In its first year of operation, the AirTrain, which connects Kennedy International Airport with the New York City subway system and the Long Island Rail Road, attracted more airline passengers, but far fewer airport employees, than had been predicted, officials said on Tuesday.

Nearly nine million passengers rode the $1.9 billion rail system last year. Currently, there are an average of 32,000 riders a day, according to two officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who discussed the rail system at a transportation conference here.

The AirTrain connections to and from the subway and commuter rail stations in Jamaica, Queens, and the subway station at Howard Beach, Queens, have both become popular with airline passengers, the officials said. Many of those passengers were flying JetBlue, the discount airline that has become the largest carrier at Kennedy.

Daily ridership is 4,500 on the Jamaica connection and 4,000 on the Howard Beach connection, for a combined fare-paying ridership of 8,500 a day. Riders using either of those connections are charged $5 in each direction. The rest of the AirTrain riders - 23,500 a day, slightly more than the 23,000 projected - are users of a free "circulator" that runs continuously in a clockwise loop every eight minutes, connecting the airport's terminals from six elevated stations.

Officials had projected 11,000 daily paid riders, divided evenly between airline passengers and airport workers. But of the 8,500 daily paid riders at the end of last year, only 1,500 were employees, according to Patty Clark, senior adviser for external affairs in the aviation department of the Port Authority, which operates the New York area airports. The ridership climbed from 5,878 a day when the AirTrain opened in December 2003.

The Port Authority, which is seeking ways to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution around the airport, hopes to increase the use of the AirTrain by the approximately 40,000 people who work at Kennedy.

The airport runs an employee parking lot that charges such low rates, Ms. Clark said, that it is less expensive for many employees to drive to work than to use public transportation and the AirTrain. Starting Feb. 1, the parking fees will increase, she said.

The Port Authority hopes that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which collects the $5 AirTrain fares, will devise a discounted special 10-ride MetroCard that workers can use on the AirTrain.

Ms. Clark and another Port Authority official, Joseph M. Englot, the assistant chief engineer for design, said that JetBlue Airways had drawn many budget-conscious passengers who use public transportation to get to the airport.

Ms. Clark and Mr. Englot discussed the AirTrain in separate talks at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, a division of the National Research Council, which advises the public and the federal government on scientific and engineering matters.

The AirTrain at Kennedy, which began service in December 2003, was a longtime goal of planners and engineers who had been seeking faster and more direct connections between Manhattan and Kennedy since the airport opened in 1948.

The Port Authority's other AirTrain opened in October 2001 and connects Newark Liberty International Airport with a train station used by Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, which serve Manhattan. That system now has an annual ridership of 12.3 million, with 33,700 daily riders on average. About 30,000 of those riders use the free airport circulator, while about 4,000 riders pay to use the connection to the train station.

From the time it awarded the main contract in 1998 to the time it finished work, the Port Authority heard frequent criticism from people who said the light rail line was not particularly convenient. Compared with the Newark AirTrain, "this system was a lot more controversial in that the New York side of the river really wanted a one-seat ride: you get on at J.F.K. and you get off at Manhattan," Ms. Clark said.

The AirTrain at Kennedy was designed with a platform height and track gauge similar to those used by the subways and the Long Island Rail Road, Mr. Englot said, so that in the future, it could be connected to new tracks leading to Manhattan.

But new rail cars would have to be designed and purchased, he said, because the AirTrain's 32 cars are automated and operate without a driver, unlike those of the subway and the commuter railroad.

Meeting the Everymen of Iraq, Courtesy of a Returning Poet

2005-01-12T18:42:00.000-06:00

Arab Film Distribution
The writer Sinan Antoon, foreground, in "About Baghdad."

January 12, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW | 'ABOUT BAGHDAD'
Meeting the Everymen of Iraq, Courtesy of a Returning Poet
By DANA STEVENS

"About Baghdad," produced and directed by an independent collective of artists and scholars, traces the journey of Sinan Antoon, a poet and journalist who left Iraq in 1991 to flee what he calls "the whole stifling atmosphere of Saddam and tyranny."

After 12 years teaching and studying Iraqi literature in the United States, Mr. Antoon returned to Baghdad in July 2003 to spend three weeks interviewing ordinary Iraqis: manual laborers, cabdrivers, writers, government workers and children. These brief, fragmentary encounters are strung together over a soundtrack of Iraqi classical songs.

It's a grim index of the situation in Iraq that July 2003 now seems a long time ago. The Baghdad of these images, just several months after the American invasion began, looks relatively intact and secure compared with the images of chaos and violence now flooding our television screens. The film's most persistent theme is the Iraqi will to self-determination: words spray-painted in Arabic on a building read: "Iraq will be ruled by Iraqis." A student expresses hope that future textbooks will read: "Baghdad did not fall. Baghdad was occupied." Again and again, those interviewed bear witness to the humiliation of living under another's rule, be it Saddam Hussein's or that of a foreign occupier.

Unlike last year's similarly structured documentary "Voices of Iraq," produced by three Americans, in which an apparent plurality of voices slowly converged into what was essentially a pro-occupation stance, "About Baghdad," which opens today at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in the East Village, manages to present a true diversity of opinion.

Although those interviewed unanimously despised the government of Mr. Hussein (the only exception is, literally, a madman who chants old Baathist slogans in the ruins of an asylum), the speakers are divided on the subject of the American presence in Iraq. They evince a complex set of attitudes toward their new American occupiers, by turns angry, resigned, hopeful and even witty. One woman watches L. Paul Bremer III, then the chief American administrator in Iraq, on television: "He is a very handsome and good-looking man. Yes, this president of ours is handsome! But we don't want him. We want an Iraqi government."

In one of the most bracing encounters of the film, a cabdriver with a chemistry degree upbraids Mr. Antoon for blaming the United States for Iraq's ills: "As Iraqis, who is responsible for us, Bush or Saddam?"

At times, these interviews could be better placed in context: only three or four of the dozens of speakers are identified by name and occupation. As a result, we learn that Iraqis hold differing opinions about the war, but not how those opinions divide along economic or social lines. The inexplicable use of split screens and multiple images (an interviewee appears in one inset box, while another box displays a Baghdad street scene) does little to bolster the power of the speakers' testimony. If anything, the technique is a distracting reminder of hyperstylized television shows like Fox's "24." Material as emotionally and intellectually challenging as this requires no gimmicks at all.

'About Baghdad'

Opens today in Manhattan.

Produced and directed by InCounter Productions (Sinan Antoon, Bassam Haddad, Dirar Hakeem, Rania Masri, Maya Mikdashi, Suzy Salamy, Nadya Sbaiti, Sherene Seikaly and Adam Shapiro); in Arabic and English, with English subtitles; directors of photography, Ms. Salamy, Mr. Haddad, Ms. Mikdashi and Mr. Shapiro; edited by Carol Mansour; music by Amer Tawfiq; released by Arab Film Distribution. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 103 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Sinan Antoon.

Deadly and Yet Necessary, Quakes Renew the Planet

2005-01-12T18:40:00.000-06:00

January 11, 2005
Deadly and Yet Necessary, Quakes Renew the Planet
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

They approach the topic gingerly, wary of sounding callous, aware that the geology they admire has just caused a staggering loss of life. Even so, scientists argue that in the very long view, the global process behind great earthquakes is quite advantageous for life on earth - especially human life.

Powerful jolts like the one that sent killer waves racing across the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26 are inevitable side effects of the constant recycling of planetary crust, which produces a lush, habitable planet. Some experts refer to the regular blows - hundreds a day - as the planet's heartbeat.

The advantages began billions of years ago, when this crustal recycling made the oceans and atmosphere and formed the continents. Today, it builds mountains, enriches soils, regulates the planet's temperature, concentrates gold and other rare metals and maintains the sea's chemical balance.

Plate tectonics (after the Greek word "tekton," or builder) describes the geology. The tragic downside is that waves of quakes and volcanic eruptions along plate boundaries can devastate human populations.

"It's hard to find something uplifting about 150,000 lives being lost," said Dr. Donald J. DePaolo, a geochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. "But the type of geological process that caused the earthquake and the tsunami is an essential characteristic of the earth. As far as we know, it doesn't occur on any other planetary body and has something very directly to do with the fact that the earth is a habitable planet."

Many biologists believe that the process may have even given birth to life itself.

The main benefits of plate tectonics accumulate slowly and globally over the ages. In contrast, its local upheavals can produce regional catastrophes, as the recent Indian Ocean quake made clear.

Even so, scientists say, the Dec. 26 tsunamis may prove to be an ecological boon over the decades for coastal areas hardest hit by the giant waves.

Dr. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a geologist at Wesleyan University who grew up in Indonesia and has studied the archipelago, says historical evidence from earlier tsunamis suggests that the huge waves can distribute rich sediments from river systems across coastal plains, making the soil richer.

"It brings fertile soils into the lowlands," he said. "In time, a more fertile jungle will develop."

Dr. de Boer, author of recent books on earthquakes and volcanoes in human history, added that great suffering from tectonic violence was usually followed by great benefits as well. "Nature is reborn with these kinds of terrible events," he said. "There are a lot of positive aspects even when we don't see them."

Plate tectonics holds that the earth's surface is made up of a dozen or so big crustal slabs that float on a sea of melted rock. Over ages, this churning sea moves the plates as well as their superimposed continents and ocean basins, tearing them apart and rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle.

The process starts as volcanic gashes spew hot rock that spreads out across the seabed. Eventually, hundreds or thousands of miles away, the cooling slab collides with other plates and sinks beneath them, plunging back into the hot earth.

The colliding plates grind past one another about as fast as fingernails grow and over time produce mountains and swarms of earthquakes as frictional stresses build and release. Meanwhile, parts of the descending plate melt and rise to form volcanoes on land.

The recent cataclysm began in a similar manner as volcanic gashes in the western depths of the Indian Ocean belched molten rock to form the India plate. Its collision with the Burma plate created the volcanoes of Sumatra as well thousands of earthquakes, including the magnitude 9.0 killer.

But despite such staggering losses of life, said Robert S. Detrick Jr., a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, "there's no question that plate tectonics rejuvenates the planet."

Moreover, geologists say, it demonstrates the earth's uniqueness. In the decades after the discovery of plate tectonics, space probes among the 70 or so planets and moons that make up the solar system found that the process existed only on earth - as revealed by its unique mountain ranges.

In the book "Rare Earth" (Copernicus, 2000), which explored the likelihood that advanced civilizations dot the cosmos, Dr. Peter D. Ward and Dr. Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington argued in a long chapter on plate tectonics that the slow recycling of planetary crust was uncommon in the universe yet essential for the evolution of complex life.

"It maintains not just habitability but high habitability," said Dr. Ward, a paleontologist. (Dr. Brownlee is an astronomer.) Most geologists believe that the process yielded the earth's primordial ocean and atmosphere, as volcanoes spewed vast amounts of water vapor, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases. Plants eventually added oxygen. Meanwhile, many biologists say, the earth's first organisms probably arose in the deep sea, along the volcanic gashes.

"On balance, it's possible that life on earth would not have originated without plate tectonics, or the atmosphere, or the oceans," said Dr. Frank Press, the lead author of "Understanding Earth" (Freeman, 2004) and a past president of the National Academy of Sciences.

The volcanoes of the recycling process make rich soil ideal for producing coffee, sugar, rubber, coconuts, palm oil, tobacco, pepper, tea and cocoa. Water streaming through gashes in the seabed concentrates copper, silver, gold and other metals into rich deposits that are often mined after plate tectonics nudges them onto dry land.

Experts say the world ocean passes through the rocky pores of the tectonic system once every million years or so, increasing nutrients in the biosphere and regulating a host of elements and compounds, including boron and calcium.

Dr. William H. Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke, says one vital cycle keeps adequate amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Though carbon dioxide is thought to cause excessive greenhouse-gas warming of the planet, an appreciable level is needed to keep the planet warm enough to support life.

"Having plate tectonics complete the cycle is absolutely essential to maintaining stable climate conditions on earth," Dr. Schlesinger said. "Otherwise, all the carbon dioxide would disappear and the planet would turn into a frozen ball."

Dr. Press, who was President Jimmy Carter's science adviser, said the challenge in the coming decades would be to keep enjoying the benefits of plate tectonics while improving our ability to curb its deadly byproducts.

"We're making progress," Dr. Press said. "We can predict volcanic explosions and erect warning systems for tsunamis. We're beginning to limit the downside effects."

Pittsburgh: A Big Happy Company Town

2005-01-12T18:37:00.000-06:00

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
Lou Bosser, a partner in the sandwich shop Peppi's in Pittsburgh, with a carb-laden Roethlisburger.

Keith Srakocic/Associated Press
The rookie Ben Roethlisberger led the Steelers to a 15-1 record.

January 12, 2005
Pittsburgh: A Big Happy Company Town
By JERE LONGMAN

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 10 - The playoffs for Pittsburgh begin here Saturday against the Jets, as the red and green of Christmas gives way to the black and gold of the Steelers. Even mannequins at the Satin and Lace lingerie shop are decked out in Terrible Towels.

"A couple of women thought they were aprons and men think they're nighties," Patty Pearce, the shop's owner, said of the towels that fans have long waved at Steelers games. "That shows you where the mind is at. Of course, my business is based on where men's minds are."

Roethlisburgers are going for $7 at Peppi's, a pricey homage to the rookie quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and his jersey number. And there appear to be more songs dedicated to the Steelers than to trains and rivers.

"There must be 20 of them, one worse than the other," said Gene Collier, co-author of a play about Art Rooney, the Steelers' founder. "What is it about the Steelers' success that makes people say, 'Where's my kazoo?' "

A magnificent 15-1 season, latticed with 14 consecutive victories, has tightened the resilient bond between the Steelers and this appealing but frayed city of immigrants. It is an attachment of civic identity, loyalty, perseverance and nostalgia for the glory days of the 1970's, when the Steelers won four Super Bowls as the steel industry crumbled.

"Pittsburgh is a throwback town," said Wallace Miller, a Steelers fan and the coroner of Somerset County, Pa., which is east of Pittsburgh. "You see people walking around in Jack Lambert and Jack Ham jerseys. And that was 30 years ago."

But wistfulness does not fully explain the relationship between Pittsburgh and the Steelers. The team is of the city, not merely in the city. It emerged from the sandlots of the north side and was purchased for $2,500 in 1933 by Rooney. The Rooney family still owns the Steelers and has fashioned them in the family's unpretentious image.

Dan Rooney, the team chairman, walks from home to each game. The Steelerettes were retired in 1970 as the Rooneys wearied of the ostentation of cheerleaders. The team's jut-jawed coach, Bill Cowher, and his reliance on running the ball and punishing defense, evoke qualities the fans see in themselves as hardworking, blunt, durable.

"In Pittsburgh, you're either a tough guy or you're not," Marc Mrvos, a distributor of medical supplies, said. "With the Steelers, things remain the same. I'm 35. In all my life, they've had two coaches."

The Rooneys have provided fidelity, committing to Pittsburgh while Westinghouse, Rockwell International, Gulf Oil, Mesta Machine, J&L Steel and U.S. Steel reduced or ceased operations, said Rob Ruck, a history lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh who is co-writing a biography of Art Rooney.

A city once defined by steel is now defined by sports, he said. Expectations demand victory. From 1960 through 1992, the Steelers, the Pirates and the Penguins won all nine championship games or series in which they participated, while Pitt also won a national collegiate football title.

"It's a divided city, not just by race and class and ethnicity, but by geography and topography, by hilltops and river valleys," Ruck said. "What unifies Pittsburgh more than anything are sports. Of any sport, it is the Steelers."

Even though Pittsburgh has diversified, and the Steelers reflect this resourcefulness, in many ways the city represents America in a rear-view mirror. The region lost 158,000 manufacturing jobs and 289,000 residents between 1970 and 1990, according to Carnegie Mellon University.

Currently, the city faces a deep financial crisis, the N.H.L. players are locked out and the Pirates struggle to maintain relevance against teams in bigger markets, with deeper pockets.

In these impecunious times, the Steelers provide a black-ink balance to a city that has suffered too much red in the ledger, said Andy Kelly, 68, a retired account executive for CSX railroad.

"We were the industrial center of the universe," he said. "Now we're in the dumps. The Steelers show we're alive, a major city, still a force."

He spoke over a beer at Chiodo's Tavern, a local institution once situated near the front gates of the immense Homestead Works of U.S. Steel.

The mills along the Monongahela River are long closed, replaced by university research buildings and the shops, the restaurants and the movie theaters of brand-name commerce. Chiodo's is as much a museum as a bar, with photographs of the Steelers dating to 1933, when they were founded as the Pirates.

"They are the city of Pittsburgh," Bob Clark, 53, a hospital purchasing manager, said of the team.

Tony Novosel, 52, a bartender at Chiodo's and an academic adviser and history teacher at Pitt, said that passion for the Steelers reminded him of passion for European soccer, where the local team is considered "immediate family."

Mrvos, the medical supplies distributor, has the Steelers' logo on his cellular phone and a likeness of goal posts inlaid in the wall of his entertainment room. On game days, he decorates the goal posts with yellow ribbon. He knows of a guy with a black-and-gold car, and of another guy with the names of Steelers greats tattooed on his back.

Dr. Rodney Landreneau, a thoracic surgeon, understands football obsession. He grew up in south Louisiana, and his father showed Louisiana State game films at Cub Scout meetings.

"Here it's crazier," Landreneau said. "At L.S.U., it's still sport. Here, it's live or die."

Several weeks ago, a patient arrived for an appointment wearing a Steelers jacket, a Steelers necklace, a Steelers pinkie ring and a Steelers watch.

"I had to tell him he had lung cancer, but all he worried about was whether the Steelers would win the next week," Landreneau said.

Fondness for the team springs from great affection for Art Rooney, its patriarch, who died in 1988. He stuck by his Steelers although they needed 40 years to win a division title.

A charming rogue, Rooney was a semipro football player, an Olympic-caliber boxer, a horse player who counted among his friends priests and racketeers, and a man who valued honesty, loyalty and patient respect for others, Ruck said.

Rooney also loved to attend wakes, said Collier, a columnist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who co-wrote the one-man play about the Steelers' founder called "The Chief."

Upon the death of his wife, Kathleen, Rooney attended the viewing of another man at the same funeral home. The man had died leaving virtually no family, Collier said, so Rooney took flowers intended for his wife and placed them near the man's coffin.

Rooney also signed the man's guest book, as did some of the Steelers, Collier said. "A night or so later, another relative of the man showed up and said, 'Dad knew Lynn Swann and Franco Harris?' " Collier said.

The play, co-written with Rob Zellers, ended its second run last month and became the most popular production in the 30-year history of Pittsburgh's Public Theater, said Ted Pappas, the theater's executive director.

"The team and play triggered what's best in this city - a sense of community, pulling through when the going gets tough, the old values of family, friendship, loyalty," Pappas said.

Not everyone has warm and fuzzy feelings. Some Steelers fans complain about vulgar behavior by ticket holders. Others grew upset about seating when the team moved from Three Rivers Stadium to Heinz Field in 2001.

"I feel betrayed," said Joe Chiodo, 86, owner of Chiodo's Tavern and a longtime season-ticket holder who said he stopped attending games because his seats were moved from the 38-yard line to "peanut heaven" in the end zone.

"I hope they lose every game," Chiodo said.

In November, nine season-ticket holders sued the Steelers over expected discounts in their upper-deck seats. A similar suit, filed in 2001 by fans who felt misled by a season-ticket brochure, was dismissed by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court last July.

William Helzlsouer, a lawyer who filed both ticket lawsuits, and an antitrust lawsuit regarding public financing of stadiums, said some ticket holders were paying $1,000 a season more than expected, an amount that could be worth $20 million to $30 million to the Rooneys over the life of Heinz Field.

"It's a bait and switch," Helzlsouer said.

The team has said it treats fans equitably and that it believes the lawsuits have no merit.

Legal issues aside, the Steelers have no trouble drawing fans at home or on the road. An estimated 20,000 Steelers supporters attended a game this season in Jacksonville, Fla., which will play host to next month's Super Bowl.

For displaced Pittsburghers, who left in pursuit of work no longer available here, the Steelers hold a particular resonance, Vic Ketchman, 53, said. He left at 44 and is senior editor of the Jacksonville Jaguars' team Web site.

"Iron City beer had a slogan, 'It tastes like coming home,' " Ketchman said. "That's what the Steelers are, like coming home."

This helps explain the popularity of running back Jerome Bettis, who accepted a pay cut to remain in Pittsburgh this season and rejuvenated his career.

"He did what most Pittsburghers wish they could do - stay here," said Novosel, the former mill worker who tends bar at Chiodo's and teaches at Pitt.

The Steelers also represent another sentimental longing, Ketchman said, apologizing if he sounded like a "hopeless romantic."

"They are the team for all the ones who like the old things," he said. "For all of us who don't want fast food, who don't want to live in a new bedroom community and pay association fees, who don't want progress forced upon us. Pittsburgh is an old place. It feels just right."

What a Hollywood acting coach taught me about teaching.

2005-01-11T17:04:00.000-06:00

teachings
The People Whisperers
What a Hollywood acting coach taught me about teaching.
By Eric Liu
Posted Friday, Jan. 7, 2005, at 12:00 PM PT

Over the last two and a half years, I traveled across the country in search of life-changing teachers and mentors from all different walks. I met race-car drivers, Indian potters, ballet dancers, rappers, research scientists, law professors, Montessori teachers, aerobatic pilots, master carpenters, and many others. The book that emerged from those travels is called Guiding Lights. It tells the stories of several of these remarkable people and the ways they transform their apprentices. And it's the basis for a series of four pieces on Slate and NPR's Day to Day in which figures from the book teach me to do something new.

I'll begin, as I begin the book, with a Hollywood acting coach named Ivana Chubbuck. Why? Not just because she excels at her craft, having taught the likes of Oscar winners Halle Berry and Charlize Theron, but also because her most striking talent is for reading people, all their utterances and body language, in their finest unwitting detail. Great teaching, in my view, begins with that kind of deep, full-body listening. Great teachers are people whisperers.

This is not as obvious as it sounds. We often have the notion in our culture that the Great Teacher is a Great Communicator: the enthralling evangelist, the mesmerizing orator. Of course, being able to communicate powerfully is vital to effective teaching. But it is still secondary. What separates good from great, across professions and domains, is the ability to receive before you transmit.

Ivana Chubbuck, at first glance, seems to be a first-rate transmitter. She broadcasts her achievements without stop. She has a forceful way about her, feral and aggressive, and she's physical and vulgar in her teachings. She has a one-track philosophy of winning that makes her acting class something like a self-empowerment seminar. She cannot abide victims or whiners. Every actor, she says, must know what the character's objective is in a scene—to win someone's love, respect, sympathy, whatever—and then must have a ruthlessness about achieving the objective. And as in the scene, teaches Ivana, so in life.

That overbearing worldview may mark her as distinctly L.A., but it also obscures her deep, almost creepily empathic, intuition. The first time we met, Ivana saw right through me. Right through my careful presentation of self, my reportorial pose, into the inner chambers. We'd known each other for 15 minutes. I was there to interview her, and had my leather-bound notebook, my questions all lined up. We chatted. I told her about the book I was writing. In passing, in response to I don't even remember what, maybe something she'd said about her family, I mentioned that my father had died over a decade ago.

An hour and a half later, after answering my queries about how she had become an acting coach, about her challenging students, her general philosophy of teaching—after all the preliminaries—Ivana decided to show me rather than tell me. We did a little exercise. She asked me to pretend I was drunk. I hadn't expected this, but here we were, and I felt more awkward about not playing along than about playing. So I gave it a shot. At first I stumbled about her living room, mimicking the weave and wobble of someone who's had one too many drinks. But my imbalance was too studied, and my eyes were too alertly scanning her face for reactions. She asked me to remove my glasses. Without them my vision descends to 20/400: The world dissolves into bleeding pools of color.

It worked. I was utterly disoriented. I couldn't see, but more important I couldn't tell where I was going next. I was genuinely in less control of myself than I'd been only a few minutes earlier. Pretty soon I was doing quite the drunk act in her house, and she chuckled with approval, paced around me in the high-ceilinged, echoey room, giving loose direction, telling me to pick up this glass or that book, to talk to her, to slur my words more when speaking.

Then, out of the blue, she asked me to think about my father. Just when I thought we were playing one game, she revealed another. As his face flashed across my mind, my own face slackened involuntarily. My mouth fell open. I exhaled, then again, like a gasp. It lasted a second, and it was over. I wasn't able to play a drunk anymore. But neither was I in the state I'd been in prior to our little scene. "Do you feel the difference?" she asked. I nodded, swallowing. Maybe now, her arched brow suggested, I would be ready to learn.

In a scene we worked on together more recently for NPR's Day to Day, in which she transformed me into a cold-blooded killer, Ivana pushed me past that moment of exposure. She surprised me—even though this time I'd been expecting it. She began by asking about my child, and we chatted about little girls and childhood games. Then she pivoted sharply. She asked me to imagine an abduction, assault. She asked me what I would do to the perpetrator. And then she had me read a scene from the film A Time To Kill, in which a man is on trial for killing the two men who'd kidnapped and raped his daughter.

With Ivana's prodding, I became by degrees more savage and purposeful in my role. When we reached the payoff line, I thought I should show righteous anger. Don't push, she said. She was right. When I read it again, you could hear something new in my voice: the icy satisfaction of vengeance. Ivana had flipped me, using leverage I didn't even realize I had given her. And our lesson reminded me that teaching doesn't start when the teacher starts talking. It starts long before.

It does not end there, of course. Teachers like Ivana Chubbuck are not just picking up a student's vibes and following them blindly; they have a distinct point of view to impart, a method to pass on and a goal to achieve. They manipulate. And that's not inherently a bad thing. When you think about it, every act of teaching is a kind of manipulation. We hope—we trust—that the manipulation is well-meant, guiding us to discovery and to a clearer sense of our own voice. But ultimately, we can be sure of that only by trying, by entering into the apprenticeship. That is the risk that every actor, on every stage, is asked to take.

Next week: Can a Major League pitching coach train someone not to overthink on the mound?
Eric Liu writes the "Teachings" column and is author of Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Our Purpose in Life.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111924/

Send a Message to God

2005-01-11T16:54:00.000-06:00

faith-based
Send a Message to God
He has gone too far this time.
By Heather Mac Donald
Posted Monday, Jan. 10, 2005, at 11:59 AM PT

In the wake of the tsunami disaster, it's time for believers to take a more proactive role in world events. It's time to boycott God.

Centuries of uncritical worship have clearly produced a monster. God knows that he can sit passively by while human life is wantonly mowed down, and the next day, churches, synagogues, and mosques will be filled with believers thanking him for allowing the survivors to survive. The faithful will ask him to heal the wounded, while ignoring his failure to prevent the disaster in the first place. They will excuse his unwillingness to stave off destruction with alibis ("God wasn't there when the tsunami hit"—Suketu Mehta) and relativising ("for each victim tens of thousands yet live"—Russell Seitz), even if those excuses contradict God's other attributes, such as omnipresence or love for each individual life.

Where is God's incentive to behave? He gets credit for the good things and no blame for the bad. Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is fond of thanking God for keeping America safe since 9/11; Ashcroft never asks why, if God has fended off terrorist strikes since 9/11, he let the hijackers on the planes on the day itself. Was God caught off guard the first time around, like the U.S. government? But he is omniscient and omnipotent.

So slavishly do his worshipers flatter God that they give him credit for things he didn't even do. Let a man rape and murder a child, and it's the man's offense; but if someone tends to the sick or shares his wealth, it's God's hand at work. The Most Rev. Gabino Zavala from the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese rejects any suggestion that God forsook the tsunami victims, according to the Los Angeles Times, but he credits God with the subsequent charity: "You can see God in the people's response—how they're reaching out."

It is a sad fact of human relations that unqualified adulation often produces from the adored one contempt and a kick in the chops, rather than gratitude and kindness. Apparently, the same applies to human-divine relations.

So, let the human race play hard to get. Imagine God's discombobulation if, after the next mass slaughter of human life, the hymns of praise and incense do not rise up. He checks the Sunday census; the pews are empty. Week after week, the churches and mosques are unattended; the usual gratitude for his not wiping out even more innocent children does not pour forth.

He starts to worry. Has he gone too far this time? Maybe he should've exercised his much heralded powers of intervention, the same powers that his erstwhile worshipers presupposed every time they prayed for him to cure a cancer victim, or get them into law school.

And so, no longer guaranteed an adoring public, he starts to make nice. He calls back avalanches poised to wipe out whole villages; he brings rain to drought-stricken communities; he cures fatally handicapped babies in the womb, or prevents such flawed conceptions before they happen. He presents tokens of his love to malaria victims and children paralyzed by auto accidents. Africa blooms with peace and prosperity.

It might not work. But the "I'm rotten-You're divine" syndrome isn't too functional, either. It's worth a try; there is nothing to lose.
Heather Mac Donald is the author of Are Cops Racist?

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112083/

Apple Unveils $499 Mac

2005-01-11T16:44:00.000-06:00

The Mac Mini is 6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall and starts at $499.

The new breed of iPod went on sale Tuesday in two versions--a 512MB model (enough memory for about 120 songs) for $99 and a 1GB version for $149.

January 11, 2005
Apple Unveils $499 Mac
By CNET News.com
SAN FRANCISCO--After decades of being criticized for producing luxury items, Apple Computer is aiming squarely at the mass market with a new budget PC unveiled Tuesday.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the new Mac Mini during his keynote address at the Macworld Expo here, promising the machine would help further expand Apple's audience beyond the Mac faithful.

Jobs also confirmed several other high-profile debuts--including a tiny flash memory iPod--that have been grinding through the Mac rumor mills, prompting the secretive company to sue the alleged source of several information leaks.

Many of the reports turned out to be true, with Jobs beginning the cavalcade of products by announcing the Mac Mini and the flash memory-based iPod.

The Mac Mini is a tiny machine with a processor, hard drive and optical drive--you supply the monitor, mouse and keyboard. Jobs said the package will settle long-standing complaints that Apple extracts too high a premium for its products. "This is the most affordable Mac ever," Jobs said. "People who are thinking of switching will have no more excuses."

The new Mac Mini will go on sale Jan. 22 and will cost $499 for the base model, or $599 for one with a bigger hard drive. The device marks one of Apple's boldest moves yet to expand PC sales beyond a loyal but limited market of Mac addicts. The iPod and Apple's iTunes music store have been responsible for a dramatic surge in Apple revenue, but to date there has been little evidence that those products have done anything for Apple's PC business.

The Mac Mini will come with Panther, the latest version of Apple's OS X operating system, plus the iLife collection of digital media applications. Like almost all Mac products, it's designed for style as well as function. "This a very robust computer, but it's very, very tiny," Jobs said.

The new breed of iPod went on sale Tuesday in two versions--a 512MB model (enough memory for about 120 songs) for $99 and a 1GB version for $149.

Both models work with a Mac or PC and have no display screen for navigating through a music library. Instead, Apple expects the players largely will be used in "shuffle" mode that serves up songs in random order.

"iPod users discovered a new way to listen to their music...shuffle," Jobs said. "With shuffle you don't have to find your music; it's shuffled up for you."

The new flash memory-based iPod Shuffle is Apple's latest bid to expand its portable music player business to more downscale consumers, following the wildly successful launch of the iPod Mini early last year.

Related link:
Visit Apple's store.

Jobs earlier derided flash-based music players as toys with limited functionality, but plunging prices for flash memory will allow Apple to produce a capable player at a suitable price.

"We've taken a look at this market, and it's a zoo," Jobs said. "There's a zillion little flash players out there...and the products are all pretty much the same. They're trying to be as easy to use as an iPod, but they have these very tiny displays and a really tortured interface."

Jobs took credit for dramatically reducing the market for flash-based music players by pushing hard-drive models downstream. "The iPod Mini worked," he said. But there's still an opportunity to grab digital music newcomers with inexpensive models, he said. "We'd like to go after the remaining mainstream flash market," Jobs said.

In other iPod news, Jobs said Apple sold 4.5 million of the players during the final quarter of 2004, and he announced that Mercedes, Volvo, Nissan and others will follow BMW's lead in offering iPod adapters in new cars.

"We believe we have just begun this era of digital music," Jobs said. "We're going to see some very healthy progress in the next year."

In addition, Jobs confirmed iWork, a new software package that will take on Microsoft's Office in the Mac software market.

The package will include Pages, a new word processing program developed by Apple, and an updated version of Keynote, a slideshow application Apple introduced two years ago.

Like other Apple products, Jobs said one of the major advantages of iWork will be its integration with the Mac OS X operating system. "iWork is a product we've created from the ground up to take advantage of OS X," he said.

The release of iWork marks another chapter in Apple's on-and-off partnership with Microsoft, whose Mac version of Office has long been the standard productivity package for the operating system, partly out of necessity. Apple's own AppleWorks package has achieved only modest market share, mostly in educational settings, and the company's FileMaker database software has never posed a significant threat to Microsoft's similar Access.

Demonstrating Pages, Jobs and Apple Vice President Phil Schiller made it clear the application isn't counting on business letters and school reports as its sweet spot. Pages includes numerous tools for adding photos to documents and creating complex documents that look like professionally made brochures.

"It's word processing with a sense of style," Jobs said. The iWork package will sell for $79 starting Jan. 22. Jobs also has more details on "Tiger," the next version of the OS X operating system, but stopped short of setting a release date more specific than the first half of 2005. However, that will still be well before the next version of Microsoft's Windows, Jobs said as he revealed the slogan, "Long before Longhorn."

Major additions to the new OS, officially known as Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, include Spotlight, Apple's entry into the growing desktop search market. Jobs said Spotlight will best new desktop search offerings from Google and Microsoft, thanks to the benefits of being integrated into OS X, which can automatically update search results as the contents of a Mac hard drive change.

"When you build it into the core OS, you can do things you can't do with a tool sitting on the side," Jobs said. "You can find things on your system you didn't even know were there."

Tiger will also include a new version 7 of the QuickTime video player and Dashboard, a new interface that will allow Mac users to quickly switch between small applications such as a calculator, language translator or weather forecasts.

"It's a place for widgets to live...to get your stuff, get in and get out," Jobs said before demonstrating a stock ticker applet displaying Apple shares. "Oh, we're down a little bit today," he said. "Well, we've still got a lot more to go in the keynote."

Jobs also touted growing support for high-definition video in an array of Mac products, including the new QuickTime and an HD-ready version of Final Cut Express, Apple's hobbyist video editing application. "2005 is going to be the year of high-definition video," Jobs said.

Kunitake Ando, president of electronics giant Sony, joined Jobs onstage to promote the HD push, including a new Sony HD camcorder. "Steve said he is a great fan of Sony products--not all of them," said Ando, whose company competes with Apple in markets such as PCs and portable music players. "Together, we can really revolutionize the way we enjoy video at home."

Rumored products that didn't appear in Jobs speech included "Asteroid," a supposed music instrument interface meant to hook into Apple's GarageBand software and the inspiration for several of Apple's suits against Mac rumor sites.

Jobs also suffered a brief technical glitch when trying to demonstrate new OS X search features, but he recovered much more quickly and gracefully than Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates during his error-riddled Consumer Electronics Show presentation last week. "That's why we have backup systems here," Jobs quipped.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/

The New York Times: Technology Momentum Is Gaining for Cellphones as Credit Cards

2005-01-10T13:48:00.000-06:00

The New York Times: Technology Momentum Is Gaining for Cellphones as Credit Cards:

January 10, 2005

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
In one system being tested, a phone uses radio signals to communicate with a reader device at the checkout.

January 10, 2005
Momentum Is Gaining for Cellphones as Credit Cards
By MATT RICHTEL

People already use their cellphones to read e-mail messages, take pictures and play video games. Before long, they may use them in place of their wallets.

By embedding in the cellphone a computer chip or other type of memory device, a phone can double as a credit card. The chip performs the same function as the magnetic strip on the back of a credit card, storing account information and other data necessary to make a purchase.

In Asia, phone makers are already selling phones that users can swipe against credit or debit card readers, in much the same way they would swipe plastic MasterCard or Visa cards. Trials are now under way to bring the technology to America, industry executives said.

Ron Brown, executive director of the Infrared Data Association, a trade group representing companies pushing the technology for cellphone credit cards, said that the new handsets could become "a major form of payment, because cellphones are the most ubiquitous device in the world." He added, though, that "cash will never go away."

Advocates say that consumers will readily embrace the technology as a way to pay for even small purchases, because it is less bother than taking a credit card out of a purse or parting with cash.

The impending changes to the cellphone happen to coincide with major shifts taking place in the banking industry. Since credit cards are still considered somewhat inconvenient, particularly for quick, small purchases, major credit card companies have developed "contactless payment" technologies for checkout counters that allow customers to wave their cards near an electronic reader without having to swipe the card or sign their name.

MasterCard, for example, has introduced a system called PayPass that lets cardholders wave a card in front of a reader to initiate a payment, much as motorists use E-ZPass and similar systems to pay tolls and ExxonMobil customers use SpeedPass to buy gas. Several major credit card companies issue PayPass cards; McDonald's has agreed to accept them at some restaurants.

And American Express announced late last year that it would have its system, ExpressPay, in more than 5,000 CVS drugstores by the middle of this year. Judy Tenzer, a spokeswoman for American Express, said the technology made it more likely that customers would use credit cards to pay for small items.

Cellphone makers are hoping these new payment systems will also make it easier to market handsets with credit card functions, although they could just as easily represent competition for the practice of paying by cellphone.

The marriage of cellphone and charge card poses some significant challenges, including security problems. To reduce fraud from stolen phones, consumers may be required to punch an authorization code into their phone each time a charge is made.

For more than a year, phone makers, software companies and computer chip manufacturers have been working to develop secure and reliable payment technology for cellphones. After the phone's chip is recognized by the electronic reader, the credit card account number will be verified, as it is now, and the price of the purchase will be added to the consumer's credit card bill.

The new phones may also be capable of being programmed for a prepaid sum from which payments could be deducted.

But there have been some glitches in the product trials, according to Jorge Fernandes, chief executive of Vivotech, a cellphone software company based in Santa Clara, Calif.

In two trials, one at a corporation in the Midwest and the other at Santa Clara University, Vivotech used infrared technology for communications between the phone and the card reader. Participants had to aim the cellphone at the reader in a certain way for the infrared beam to be picked up.

"People got very upset," Mr. Fernandes said. "Pointing your cellphone at a target is very difficult."

Mr. Fernandes said the company believed it might have solved that problem by switching to a technology that uses low-level radio signals. Last month, Vivotech began testing the technology, which allows users to wave the phone within a couple of inches of a reader, at a sports arena in the Atlanta area.

Cellphones are becoming mainstream payment devices in Korea and Japan. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo, the mobile phone operator, said that it had already sold more than a million phones equipped with chips that include the payment function.

More than 13,000 Japanese shops have electronic readers capable of communicating with the phones. For now, the phones are used mostly to debit a prepaid amount, which is deposited by plugging the phone into a machine similar to an A.T.M. that takes cash and credits the handset.

In South Korea, people are already using cellphones as credit cards, said Sue Gordon-Lathrop, vice president for the consumer products platform for Visa International. She said American consumers would eventually embrace these new functions, but acceptance could be slower than in Japan and Korea, where people are more comfortable with using phones for many purposes.

Also, she said, there are more cellphone operators in America, making it harder to set standard technology and business practices. "The phones are exciting, but it's going to be a long time" before a widespread base of merchants and consumers in America are equipped to use them, she said.

For now, some of the major American cellphone companies are monitoring the technology without committing to it. Jim Ryan, senior vice president of product development for Cingular Wireless, the country's largest cellphone provider, said the company was "closely watching" the progress in this field.

RodeoHouston announces 2005 lineup

2005-01-10T13:30:00.000-06:00

Jan. 10, 2005, 12:04PM
RodeoHouston announces 2005 lineup

Houston Marathon

2005-01-09T17:09:00.000-06:00

Jan. 9, 2005, 12:11AM
It's all about the people
High technology, Texas hospitality separate local race from bigger events
By DALE ROBERTSON
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Houston's marathon has changed with the times, and the evolving city it represents. Sponsored by computer giant Hewlett-Packard, the race carries the banner for the "new" Houston in its 33rd year, embracing the human element and cutting-edge technology while largely eschewing the "old" Houston notion that bigger and richer automatically equate to better.

More than twice as many runners annually wend through the boroughs of New York, and Chicago's prize money, which totals nearly $800,000, dwarfs Houston's $118,000.

But neither of those races, to cite two notable examples, offers the rank-and-file runner anywhere near the comfort and convenience, or even the ambience, the Houston event does, says Steve Karpas, managing director of the HP Houston Marathon.

"We're the peoples' marathon," says the transplanted South African, a former financial planner who moved to the area with his family when he was 15 and has overseen the race since 2001. "Our focus is on producing a turn-key, hassle-free experience for everyone."

The staging area is ensconced comfortably indoors at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Each of the more than 16,000 total runners expected to run/jog/walk/stagger/crawl all or portions of the 26.2-mile loop to the Galleria area and back next Sunday — supported en route by nearly 5,000 volunteers — will be fed a hot breakfast in the convention center when they return.

"Most races give you an apple and a banana and say, 'Thank you very much,' " says Karpas, an avid marathoner.

High-tech pioneer
Besides brunch, Houston's competitor-friendly approach features Texas' only fully closed course (no sharing the streets with cars) and the latest techno-gadgetry to allow friends and family members to stay on top of the runners' progress. It's that element of the package that, according to Karpas, most dramatically sets Houston apart from the hundreds of other marathons.

"We're the most technologically advanced race in the world," Karpas says. "That's our greatest claim to fame."

With HP for a partner, it makes sense. Karpas and Compaq, the company that subsequently merged into HP, conspired in 2001 to invent a runners tracking system unprecedented in the sport. Many races have since incorporated varying degrees of the Houston-born technology, but the local race again has raised the bar by going wireless with its system for 2005.

Speaking the lingo, Karpas says "push" technology has replaced "pull" technology.

"You don't have to be sitting in front of a desktop (computer) anymore to see how somebody's progressing," he says. "Your wife or husband could be waiting on the course, or shopping in New York for that matter, and still find out where you are and how you're doing by pulling out the Blackberry.

"If I was running, I would register your cell-phone number. Then, during the race, a small computer chip attached to my shoe would send out signals to the phone, telling you when I crossed certain points (seven total) and what my time was when I did."

For local spectators not thusly equipped, four Starbucks along the route will have race personnel stationed at them capable of providing the information upon request.

Further, live streaming video of the finish will be available on the marathon's Web site.

"Nobody's doing all that we're doing in this area," Karpas says.

Much to offer
The race's amenities have not gone unnoticed. After several years of stagnant or even declining interest, entries have increased twofold since 2001 and led to the organizers' decision to institute a cap this year. Both the full marathon and the Aramco Half-Marathon, which will serve as the 2005 U.S. championship race, will be limited to 7,500 runners each. The Houston Press 5K fun run brings another 1,000 or so into the mix.

Will the world's best runners be in the field? No, not with relatively modest first prizes of $10,000 for the winning men and women ($5,000 for the half-marathon) and not a dime of appearance money on the table. Some marathons offer as much as $300,000 in guarantees to attract the elite. Houston's race has opted to invest in making the event more attractive for the weekend-warrior variety — all those computer chips, never mind the scrambled eggs, don't come cheaply — so the city as a whole can profit.

But as Karpas is quick to remind, the race had dropped prize money in 2001, choosing to dedicate its resources to get the computer tracking program up and running. Now, with the system in place, the total purse has almost doubled from $62,000 in 2003 and is approaching the $125,000 offered in 2000.

There is enough cash to have attracted a number of world-class runners from Kenya and Europe, and the half-marathon having been designated the U.S. championship race enhanced that field as well.

Boon to economy
Some 20 percent of the entries will come in from elsewhere, and every state and nearly 30 countries will be represented. So many out-of-towners are coming in that the major downtown hotels are booked for race weekend.

The headquarters Hilton Americas-Houston, adjacent to the convention center, ran out of rooms by early December.

"The runners bring family members and stay for an average of three days," Karpas says. "They shop, they visit museums, they eat in our restaurants and, hopefully, they go home and tell their friends what a great city we have.

"What else of this magnitude is happening in downtown every year? Not the Super Bowl or the All-Star Game."

Karpas says his hard data show the race's economic impact with 11,000 runners, the total for 2002, was $23 million.

"With 16,000," he says, "we estimate it will exceed $25 million. So you have to consider the overall picture of what the marathon means to the city.

"It's not just a bunch of crazy, skinny people coming together to run a few miles and feel good while tying up traffic."

The race's charitable contributions should be noted. After $602,000 was handed over to some 30 local nonprofits last winter — up from $350,000 in 2003 — the figure is expected to top $700,000 this year.

An additional benefit of the marathon that Karpas is particularly proud of should benefit the community in a more esoteric way.

As Houston continues to be saddled with a reputation for being America's fattest city, some 4,000 area middle school children from 77 schools and 20 districts will participate in a 1.8-mile fun run Saturday. The kids have spent the last two months learning how to eat sensibly and exercise properly.

Another historic event coming to city

2005-01-09T17:03:00.000-06:00

Jan. 9, 2005, 12:54AM

SOCCER NOTEBOOK
Another historic event coming to city
Four of Mexico's best teams to meet in what will be a soccer fiesta
By GLENN DAVIS
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

This Wednesday at Reliant Stadium, Houston hosts another historic sporting event involving four of Mexico's best soccer clubs.

The winners of the two games in the Interliga finals will join an already qualified Club Pachuca in representing Mexico at the prestigious Copa Libertadores, which crowns a champion of South America.

The night will be a soccer fiesta, with outstanding quality of play, international stars and colorful fans.

The entertainment value and intrigue will be there, but this event holds a key to marketing Houston nationally and internationally as a soccer city.

The city also will stand to benefit economically in a variety of ways.

Lone Star Sports and Entertainment, which is partnering with Soccer United Marketing to put on the event, knows this is more than a soccer match.

Lone Star Sports and Entertainment head Jamey Rootes put together an impressive Interliga committee that includes business leaders and City Council members such as Carol Alvarado and Adrian Garcia to help ensure the success of the event.

"It means a great deal to Lone Star Sports and our committee to have this backing. To see the city embrace this like other championships is phenomenal," said David Brady, event manager for Lone Star Sports and Entertainment.

Alvarado and Garcia have the ability to bring business leaders and community members together in support of the Interliga.

"It shows that the U.S. Hispanic market is willing and able to support significant events like this with Mexican league teams," Alvarado said. "This is like a Super Bowl event in the community. If we do a good job this year, it increases our chances to host the Interliga on a permanent basis in the future."

With teams, media and fans descending on Houston for the finals, the economic benefits will be reaped by area hotels, restaurants and merchants.

"The business community sees this as an enormous opportunity to not only support the event but reach soccer fans, (who are) a growing segment of the population," Brady said.

All involved want visitors to have a memorable experience, and that includes the teams.

"The teams will have a world-class experience in Houston the minute they touch down," Brady said.

Rootes knows that successful events like the Interliga finals can go a long way toward one day hosting more matches of importance, such as World Cup qualifiers or the Gold Cup.

Who knows? There might one day be a World Cup final in Reliant Stadium.

Attendance elsewhere
Attendance at other venues during the Interliga preliminary rounds included 15,078 in Phoenix; 23,102 in pouring rain at the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif.; and 14,622 this past Wednesday in San Jose, Calif., where fans saw 13 goals in two games that included Tigres defeating Santos 4-3 behind three goals from Javier Saavedra and Atlante and Chivas drawing 3-3 on the smaller Spartan Stadium field. ... Chivas used third-choice goalkeeper Sergio Garcia after an injury to Mexican national team goalkeeper Oswaldo Sanchez in San Jose. Backup Alfredo Talavera was slated to start but was rushed to the hospital after an allergic reaction after a flu shot. ... Sebastian Gonzalez of Atlante was suspended for three games by the Mexican Soccer Federation after getting red-carded in the team's opening 2-1 loss to Tigres last Sunday at the Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix for dousing a linesman with water. ... Today's Soccer Hour with Glenn Davis (5 p.m., KPFT, 90.1 FM) features new Colorado Rapids head coach Fernando Clavijo. Also, tune in at noon Wednesday for a special Interliga edition of The Soccer Hour with Glenn Davis that includes guests, team breakdowns and ticket giveaways.

Thumbs up
To all youth groups who plan on attending Interliga matches this Wednesday. If we want Houston to continue to be a soccer destination, we must walk the walk and attend. Getting youth in this environment will help with their appreciation and passion for the sport and help make them better players.

Red card
To those who call the Interliga finals strictly a Hispanic event. Sure, the teams are all from Mexico and might appeal more to Hispanics, but this is about quality soccer. This event is not exclusive to any soccer fans, male or female.

A twang Texans really can call their own

2005-01-09T17:00:00.000-06:00

Jan. 8, 2005, 10:55PM

A twang Texans really can call their own
On the trail of y'all, linguists find pride among double modals
By HOWARD WITT
Chicago Tribune

SAN ANTONIO - Turns out it's all in the y'all.

If you find yourself in a group of Southerners and want to spot the Texan in the bunch, listen hard for the "y'alls." Most of the group will surely use the contraction, but the Texan is more likely to employ it to refer to a single individual as well.

That's just one of the unusual discoveries made by two linguistics professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio who are studying Texas Twang, the distinctive dialect of English proudly spoken by natives of the Lone Star State — and sometimes ridiculed by the rest of the country.

The husband-wife team, Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery, are fixin' to complete the last of their research this summer. When they're done finished with their work, which is underwritten by the National Geographic Society, they might could write the definitive guide to what they lovingly call TXE, or Texas English.

"Texas is different — it's the only state that was its own country at one time and has its own creation story," said Bailey, a native of Alabama and provost and executive vice president of the university. "Out of that has come a sense of braggadocio and a strong desire to hold on to a unique way of speaking."

"Y'all" is a case in point. Use of the term is spreading beyond the South throughout the United States, Tillery noted, largely because it fills a linguistic need: It's a clearer way to denote the second-person plural than the existing — and confusing — "you."

But Texans, in a kind of defiant counter-reaction to the mass appropriation of their beloved term, now also use it to refer to one person as well as many ("Y'all are my beautiful wife"), Tillery said. That, of course, is precisely the kind of confusion that "y'all" evolved to clear up in the first place.

"If the rest of the country says you can't use 'y'all' except for more than one person, then of course we're going to take it and say, no, you can use it for one person," said Tillery, whose drawling speech bears the marked twang of her childhood home in Lubbock.

"For me it's a conscious effort, because I was treated as such a backwards pea-brain because of how I talked that I decided I would just be very upfront and even more pronounced," she said. "I'll tell you something — it's a good way to hide an intellect."

To conduct their research, Bailey and Tillery have divided the state into 116 geographic grids and have sought to interview four representative Texans in each one. Ideally they try to find four generations of a single family, to chart linguistic changes over time. To locate their subjects, they often approach small-town postmasters for referrals.

Interviewees are asked a series of 250 questions to check unique Texas pronunciations and determine whether they use certain words and phrases, such as "polecat" for skunk or "snake feeder" for dragonfly.

Some of the terms are used elsewhere across the southern United States as well, but many combinations are distinctively Texan.

Then the interview subjects read aloud a brief story, My Friend Hugo, carefully designed by Tillery to contain every vowel sound and phonetic variation in the English language. To an expert linguist, how a person reads the story can reveal where that person comes from.

Most native Texans, for example, use a flat "i", saying "naht" for "night" and "rahd" for "ride," and they don't make any audible distinction when pronouncing such words as "pool" and "pull" or "fool" and "full."

The researchers have found that some distinctive Texas speech patterns, such as saying "warsh" instead of "wash" and "lard" instead of "lord," are beginning to disappear as younger generations abandon them.

But in other ways, Texas English is expanding. Newcomers to the state soon begin sounding like Texans, Bailey noted, tossing around "y'all" and saying "Ahma fixin' to" (generally defined as "I will do it if I get around to it").

The infamous double modal ("might could," "may can," "might would"), a hedging construction denoting less certainty than "might" alone, remains more elusive to new arrivals, however.

When all is said and done, do Texans sound funny?

"Not to Texans," Bailey said, "and not really to other people in the South."

New building stands out amidst the Texas Medical Center's sterile architecture

2005-01-09T16:48:00.000-06:00

Jan. 8, 2005, 7:09PM
New building stands out amidst the Texas Medical Center's sterile architecture
By CLIFFORD PUGH
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Quick: Name a stunning work of architecture in the Texas Medical Center.

Don't be surprised if nothing much comes to mind.

The Medical Center has a history of tearing down significant buildings, such as the Shamrock Hotel, and putting up a hodgepodge of oversized institutional structures devoid of personality.

Of course, one might argue that the primary purpose of the renowned medical complex of hospitals, research and education institutions located about five miles south of downtown Houston is to save lives, not to create innovative, striking buildings.

Is it possible to do both?

Bruce Webb, professor at the University of Houston's Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, believes so -- although it's not easy.

"Most people's complaint about going to medical facilities is that they lack feeling," he said. "They seem to be facilities without compassion.

"(But) it's a hard thing (to push for good design) when everyone is angling for money and someone is using the argument that a particular material should be used because it's easy to clean germs off of."

The tug-of-war between good architecture and the bottom line makes the new University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Nursing and Student Community Center special.

In a sea of bland and downright inhospitable buildings, the $58 million structure, which opened to classes in August, is a jewel. It's visually appealing and friendly to the environment and the students who use it.

It's no wonder the building is winning design awards and attracting university administrators from across the country and around the world who are curious about its energy-saving features and starkly modern design.

At last, it seems a Texas Medical Center building has gotten it right, architecturally.

It all began with an idea
From the building's conception in the mid-1990s, UTHSC administrators John Poretto and Brian Yeoman, with the support of former president M. David Low, touted a novel idea: Since the university is in the business of promoting good health, shouldn't the building be healthy, too?

In 1996, UT officials sponsored an international design competition. The winner, Patkau Architects of Vancouver, British Columbia, came up with a design that met the high standards of the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.

Four years later, the project, stalled on the drawing board, was nearly scuttled after the Canadian architects and UT parted ways over costs and design changes.

Two firms were brought in to redesign the building. Berkebile Nelson Immenschuh McDowell Architects of Kansas City is a pioneer in sustainable design; its Deramus Education Pavilion at that city's zoo won an Earth Day award from the American Institute of Architects.

San Antonio's Lake/Flato Architects won the prestigious AIA Firm of the Year award in 2003. Its trademark, reflected in several Texas Hill Country residences and such commercial structures as the SBC Center in San Antonio, is designing buildings that blend in with the Texas landscape.

After winning the commission, the new design team, led by BNIM principal architect Steve McDowell and Lake/Flato co-founder David Lake, met for a brainstorming session.

The project site -- a sliver of land between the UT School of Public Health and tiny Grant Fay Park, at the intersection of Holcombe and Bertner -- presented the first challenge. Putting a large building on such a small site was "like threading a needle," said former UTHSC campus architect Rives Taylor.

To maximize space, the design team came up with the idea of a "stacked" community center, with six floors of offices, classrooms and research laboratories above two floors of student-friendly facilities, including a large lounge, cafeteria, auditorium and bookstore.

The eight-story building takes up most of the lot but doesn't overwhelm the surroundings, unlike the Taj Mahal-like new M.D. Anderson Ambulatory Clinical Building across the street.

Ingenious and sustainable materials
Lake/Flato took the lead in designing the exterior, composed almost entirely of recycled materials. Bricks from a 19th-century warehouse in San Antonio, wood siding made of sinker cypress hauled from the bottom of the Mississippi River, panels of recycled aluminum and columns made of Flyash (a recycled byproduct of coal-burning) fit together on the Holcombe Avenue side of the building like a giant Erector set.

The Bertner facade is wrapped in perforated, corrugated metal, with window cutouts peeking through like sleepy eyes. It faces west, so in the afternoon, the sun casts the silver metal facade with a golden hue.

Inverted L-shaped steel rods on the roof, which are intended to one day hold a photovoltaic system providing solar energy, lend a sculptural feeling to the building and add a playful note to the neighborhood.

The team from BNIM concentrated on interior design, and here the building shines. Most stairways, elevators and toilets are on the west side of the building, leaving the east side open to Grant Fay Park. Nearly the entire back of the building is windowed, allowing a view of the trees in the small park — yes, there are trees in the Medical Center — from just about anyplace inside.

Bringing the outside in
Natural light also floods the front of the building, via thousands of tiny holes in the corrugated metal. Even the core of the building — normally the darkest part of a structure — gets a lot of natural light, thanks to two large atriums.

Natural light even tumbles into the three major stairwells. Two covered outdoor stairwells and one inside stairwell that is open to the windowed exterior and to the building are so inviting that students often walk up or down a couple of floors rather than wait for an elevator.

"It's amazing that you can take the stairs and see sunlight and you don't feel you're in any danger," said Kim Nuñez, a 39-year-old nursing student. "Throughout the building, we can be inside and feel like it's outside."

Adjustable louvers, tensile fabric and heat sensors on the windows gauge how much light to let into the building, helping control heating and air-conditioning costs. Energy-saving features such as sensors that turn on restroom lights when someone enters also are expected to reduce costs.

In designing an energy-friendly building, however, the design team didn't forget the main mission of creating a first-rate, modern nursing school. The building contains 23 classrooms with the latest technical equipment, computer labs and a nursing-skills lab with 32 beds and robotic figures to practice on.

A few kinks to be massaged
Some bugs remain to be worked out. With ductwork under the floors instead of in the ceilings, the occupant of each work space can control temperature by opening or closing a duct, but complaints persist that the building is too chilly.

A much-touted system using recycled water also has left some users cold. Rainwater is captured in five 25,000-gallon tanks on the roof and is used in toilets and for irrigating the surrounding landscape. Some have complained of toilets that spout water on users and sinks whose water never warms up.

But such grousing seems a bit nitpicky. From top to bottom, the building is a tribute to good planning and execution. A lot of thought went into how to make an institutional building more welcoming.

Balconies are landscaped with native Texas plants and provide spectacular views. In many places, windows can open to let in fresh air. Orange sofas in the student lounge have no armrests, so students can stretch out for a nap. They can get into the building with a card at any hour.

On a wintry December day before final exams, several students camped in the lounge even though classes were not in session.

"It's a good place to study," said John Garcia, a 23-year-old junior nursing student who was prepping for final exams with fellow student Michael Vo, 25.

Such sentiments convince planners that the building will serve as a good recruiting tool.

"It's not just the quality of resources and the quality of education. It's the feeling of a place that is so very important in recruiting and retention," Taylor said. "This is about making a place that people want to be — a place that teaches by the way it is built."

New building stands out amidst the Texas Medical Center's sterile architecture

2005-01-09T16:27:00.000-06:00

Jan. 8, 2005, 7:09PM
New building stands out amidst the Texas Medical Center's sterile architecture
By CLIFFORD PUGH
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Hester + Hardaway / Bnim Architects
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW: Nearly the entire east side of the new University of Texas Health Science Center School of Nursing and Student Community Center is windowed, offering a great view of Grant Fay Park.

Hester + Hardaway / Bnim Architects
BRIGHT IDEA: The core of the building, which normally is a structure's darkest part, gets a lot of natural light from two large atriums.

Hester + Hardaway / Bnim Architects
JUST TAKE THE STAIRS: "It's amazing that you can take the stairs and see sunlight ... ," said nursing student Kim Nuñez. "Throughout the building, we can be inside and feel like it's outside.

E. Joseph Deering / Chronicle
MEMORIAL HERMANN HOSPITAL, 6411 FANNIN: This lavishly detailed Spanish-style building, designed by the Chicago firm of Berlin & Swern, opened in 1925, 11 years after the death of oilman-philanthropist George H. Hermann, who left the bulk of his estate for a charity hospital. Meticulously restored in 1990 by David Hoffman, it provides a welcoming, human-scale entrance to the Medical Center from Hermann Park.

Chronicle file
ST. LUKE'S MEDICAL TOWER, 6624 FANNIN: When it opened in 1990, this 29-story, twin-spired octagonal tower clad in silver reflective glass quickly became the Medical CenterÕs architectural signature. One reason: The top looks like two giant hypodermic needles and can be seen from miles away. Architect Cesar PelliÕs project gives the area a modern, much-needed sense of place.

Chronicle file
TEXAS MEDICAL CENTER, JOHN P. MCGOVERN CAMPUS, 2450 HOLCOMBE: This 1948 Nabisco cookiefactory, about a mile east of the Medical Center's heart, has been renovated by W.O. Neuhaus Associates into offices, laboratories and classrooms. Architects retained the original wide hallways, wooden floors, high ceilings and skylights while covering the loading dock with a metal canopy.

Hitler's Hit Parade

2005-01-05T17:55:00.000-06:00

CCW Film 2003

'Hitler's Hit Parade,' a new German documentary, presents a collage of popular culture from Nazi Germany."

January 5, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW | 'HITLER'S HIT PARADE'
It's the Nazi Era, but It Looks So Familiar
By A. O. SCOTT

The images in "Hitler's Hit Parade," a German documentary opening today at Film Forum, seem to come from an eerily recognizable pop-culture parallel universe, whose creepiest aspect may be its blithe normalcy. As singers croon through lush ballads and peppy dance numbers, we see images of long-stemmed chorines and frolicking lovers, some in satiny black-and-white, others in grainy home-movie color.

If these archival clips from the 1930's and 40's were American, parts of this film, directed by Oliver Axer and Suzanne Benze, might be mistaken for the latest installment in the "That's Entertainment" franchise. They depict a swirling, by now slightly quaint world of cinematic fantasy, interspersed with some images of sunlit reality, mostly smiling children and their sturdy parents. The lyrics are full of noble sentiment, if occasionally touched by an inkling of longing or romantic disappointment.

But of course, as the film's title makes clear, these ditties and scenes come not from Hollywood but from Nazi Germany, and they are arranged to emphasize the dark irony that such wholesome blandness and suave sophistication could be part of the self-image of radical evil. Not that Nazi popular culture was all benign pictures and pretty songs. We see plenty of Hitler salutes, grotesquely anti-Semitic children's cartoons, death camp inmates and the bloodied corpses of German soldiers on the battlefield. These sights give some of the songs - like a mournful lovers' ballad called "The Last Tram" - an unwarranted, almost ugly poignancy.

"Hitler's Hit Parade," despite its jaunty title, is structured to make the most of that uncanny, haunted feeling. There is no voice-over, no explanation - only the songs themselves, which are announced with stylized onscreen titles. This can be a bit frustrating to your sense of historical curiosity. I found myself wondering who wrote these songs, who sang them and who those ghostly movie stars were. The brief song credits at the end were not very satisfying in this regard, and the absence of chronological or contextual cues makes the film's short running time drag more than it should.

Documenting the production of Nazi popular culture - its film studios and record distributors, as well as the artists who disgraced themselves in its service - is not what the filmmakers set out to do. Instead, they have gathered some of the products of the German culture industry into a monstrous and fascinating installation - a collage that illustrates Hannah Arendt's famous diagnosis of the banality of evil and reveals facets of it that have been forgotten as the living memory of the Nazi era has faded. We recall Hitler's Reich as an unparalleled historical catastrophe, but "Hitler's Hit Parade" suggests that for its citizens, its moral distortions were as ordinary as a trip to the local cinema or a popular song on the radio.

'Hitler's Hit Parade'

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Oliver Axer and Susanne Benze; edited by Mechthild Bruns; produced by C. Cay Wesnigk. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 76 minutes. This film is not rated.

Bloggin DC

2005-01-04T13:22:00.000-06:00

Bloggin DC: "

The United Arab Emirates is building the world's tallest building in Dubai. It will be an incredible 160 stories tall. Since the only people who do any work in the UAE are 'guest workers' from third-world countries, this will also be the world's largest servants' quarters. The building is potentially quite beautiful, though, in a phallic, Star Wars kind of way."

The Wine Wars, Spilled Onto the Screen

2005-01-02T13:01:00.000-06:00

"Mondovino," a documentary by Jonathan Nossiter, left, is a defense of the individuality of small wine producers like Lina Colombu, right, in Sardinia, Italy.

January 2, 2005
The Wine Wars, Spilled Onto the Screen
By KRISTIN HOHENADEL

PARIS

IT'S not often that French movie circles and French wine circles are buzzing about the same thing. But "Mondovino," Jonathan Nossiter's documentary about the globalization of wine, has movie critics here reaching for superlatives and some wine experts lobbing expletives, while audiences have turned the movie into a surprise hit.

"What you dream of when you make a film - and it's the first time it's ever happened to me - is that it becomes a provocation for debate," Mr. Nossiter said recently at his high-ceilinged Paris loft, where film-editing equipment occupies one corner and dozens of empty wine bottles line what seems like every available shelf.

The film landed amid a wine crisis: consumption in France has been dropping, and some native producers feel threatened by an invasion of wines from abroad and pressured to make more universally accessible wines. More than a wine documentary, "Mondovino" is a passionate defense of the individuality of small wine producers in a more standardized world. Its unflattering portrayal of advocates of homogenization has angered some in the French wine establishment, but Mr. Nossiter, who calls "Mondovino" a "militant" film, insists that he was fair and respectful toward all of the participants.

The film draws a complex picture of an industry torn between those who embrace the trend toward a homogenized taste and those who do not. The New York-based wine importer Neal Rosenthal, who grew up drinking milk in Brooklyn, defines the conflict as a fight between "the Resistance and the collaborators." The Bordeaux-based wine consultant Michel Rolland, who works for 100 vineyards in 12 countries, preaches the gospel of globalization, half-jokingly dismissing "diversity" as the reason "there are so many bad wines."

A former sommelier with 15 years' experience devising wine lists for New York restaurants, Mr. Nossiter began working on the film as a two-month break between feature projects. (He is the director of "Sunday," which won a Cannes grand jury prize in 1997, and "Signs and Wonders," a 2000 film about a rocky marriage starring Stellan Skarsgard and Charlotte Rampling.) But his quickie wine documentary soon turned into a four-year obsession, with Mr. Nossiter following his nose from France to Italy, Napa, Argentina and Brazil to dramatize the battle for the soul of his favorite beverage.

"The point was not to make a film about wine for wine lovers," Mr. Nossiter said. "I couldn't imagine anything more boring - anything that would betray more my real love of wine."

Mr. Nossiter, son of the late Bernard Nossiter, a former United Nations bureau chief at The New York Times, possesses a merciless, novelistic eye for character and a journalist's instinct for hunting down both sides of a story. He interviewed his subjects in five of the half-dozen languages he learned while growing up between the United States and Europe. The movie, which Mr. Nossiter has sold in 30 countries and is making into a 10-part television series, is to open in the United States in March. Mr. Nossiter said he had already heard from American wine companies expressing concern about the film.

Last May, "Mondovino" became only the fourth documentary ever shown in competition at Cannes. Despite complaints at Cannes about its length (34 minutes have been cut from the film, which originally ran 2 hours and 49 minutes) and what some critics described as drunkenly jerky camerawork, "Mondovino" has been widely and enthusiastically reviewed in the French news media. The daily Libération called it "gripping," and Le Monde referred to it as "an epic" that "gave off a perfume of intelligence and impertinence." French magazines have used the film as a springboard for cover articles about the globalization of taste, as part of a continuing national discussion about the future of wine.

But even before the film opened, Mr. Nossiter said, he felt a backlash from the French wine establishment. His invitation to a post-screening debate organized by an influential trade magazine, Revue des Vins de France, was rescinded. And, he said, he has received telephone calls, faxes and e-mail messages threatening lawsuits and worse. "The wine world is ruled by secrecy and snobbery - it's a clubby, chummy, hermetically sealed little world," he said. "There's an almost mafia-like omertà in the wine world, because there's never really been any outside scrutiny."

Mr. Nossiter's most vocal critic has been Mr. Rolland, who has remade wines from France to Argentina for global tastes - often to plaudits from the influential American wine critic Robert Parker, a longtime friend who is also featured in the film. Onscreen, Mr. Rolland smokes cigarillos and talks on a cellphone in the back of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, advising many of his clients to "micro-oxygenate" their wine (injecting it with microscopic bubbles to soften tannins). He brushes off Mr. Nossiter's on-camera request for specifics about his methods - and laughs, according to a journalist in Le Monde, like Mephistopheles. Mr. Rolland tried to discredit Mr. Nossiter, whose first film was "Resident Alien," a 1990 documentary about Quentin Crisp, with a strident retort in the British trade magazine Off License News. Mr. Rolland quoted an anonymous journalist who labeled the filmmaker's work "dishonest and biased," calling him "a swindler," and adding that Mr. Nossiter "must have grown up, like so many Americans, surrounded by Coca-Cola, hamburgers and the 'Muppet Show,' which produces a very particular kind of culture." (In a subsequent edition, the British wine writer Stephen Brook called this portrayal of Mr. Nossiter "grotesque," adding, "It's unfortunate that Rolland, rather than addressing the issues, resorts instead to sneering.")

"I'm a wine expert, a peasant, a simple person," Mr. Rolland said when reached on his cellphone. "And I don't like liars or people who make up stories. Jonathan Nossiter in this matter is a liar and a maker up of stories. And I won't forgive him!" He said, most notably, that Mr. Nossiter had augmented the sound of his laugh to make him appear ridiculous and had used an off-the-record comment in which he called Languedoc residents who had fought to prevent his client, the Robert Mondavi family, from setting up shop in France "hicks." (Mr. Nossiter denied the charges.)

"If people are unhappy with the portrait they see in the film, they have, you know, only themselves to blame," Mr. Nossiter said. "I'm not Spielberg - there's no special effects here." Nevertheless, it's not difficult to see which side of the ideological battle he is on, with his lyrical treatment of artisanal winemakers from Sardinia to Argentina ("It takes a poet to make a great wine," says a Languedoc winemaker, Aimé Guibert, walking among his vines) and his knack for catching corporate wine giants with their pants down (including an accidentally revealing scene in which a leading Burgundian wine producer, wearing only boxer shorts, performs an impromptu grape-crushing demonstration). If people are angry, Mr. Nossiter said, "they should look in the mirror."

The wine world is a microcosm of the world at large, he added, and "Mondovino" is above all an old-fashioned look at the nature and uses of power. "If you'd made a wine film in the fourth century B.C.," he said, "you would have observed the end of the Greek empire and seen the Greeks trying to colonize their last,Iraq-like gambit in the Sicilian expedition at the end of the Peloponnesian War - planting vines, making war. Act of civilization, act of imperial power. I think this is still true today."

Jonathan Caouette | Filmmaker - Tarnation

2005-01-01T19:04:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Caouette | Filmmaker - Tarnation

Houston Filmmakers and Actors

2004-12-31T06:01:00.000-06:00

Houston Filmmakers and Actors

2004-12-30T07:52:00.000-06:00

The subcontinent stays in the picture: The Eagle Theater in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of several theaters in the outer boroughs where Bollywood films have unspooled for decades.

November 14, 2004
FIRST PERSON
Bollywood Confidential
By SUKETU MEHTA

Why do I love Bollywood movies? To an Indian, that's like asking why we love our mothers; we don't have a choice. We were born of them. Though Hindu gods are the obsession, even Muslims genuflect before the screen when they see their heroes walk on. It is significant that, except for Satyajit Ray, there isn't much of an internationally known Indian art cinema; the shadow of Bollywood is too long. Bollywood, and its cousins in the South Indian film industry, have beaten Hollywood at its own game: matching success at the box office with equal success in the battle for the hearts and minds of the audience -- conquering their very dream lives. Kitschy, illogical, often defying common sense, these movies have made me who I am. They shape the way I conduct my love affairs or think about religion or treat my elders.

But it's not just Indians who think this way. The Indian film industry has penetrated into vast, and unlikely, areas of the globe; a hit Hindi movie will be dubbed or subtitled in a dozen foreign languages -- French, Mandarin, Malay. In New York, whenever I get a haircut, I'm confident of getting a discount if the hairdresser is from the former Soviet Union. Indian movies became popular there beginning in the 1950's. The Soviets gave us arms; we gave them our kitsch movies in return. Israelis watch them. Palestinians watch them. Indians and Pakistanis watch them. Dominicans and Haitians watch them. Iraqis watch them. Iranians watch them. In a building full of immigrants in Queens, an Uzbek man once cornered me in a dark stairwell. I'd been mugged before, and I thought, Oh, no. As he towered over me, he started singing, "Ichak dana bichak dana, . . . " a Bollywood standard from the 50's.

All these people watch Bollywood movies because the stories they tell are pre-cynical. Bollywood believes in motherhood, patriotism and true love. Hollywood is too ambivalent about family for their tastes. My friend Abdelkader, a Moroccan writer who grew up in the Netherlands, told me why Moroccans watch Hindi movies: "We like that, in the end, everyone bows down and touches the mother's feet."

The standard Western complaint about Bollywood movies is that they're melodramatic, but for those who love them, melodrama in the defense of entertainment is no vice. Take this explanation from a Dominican cabby in New York, who, along with his 14 siblings, grew up watching Hindi movies. He couldn't remember the title of a single one, but he did remember what he liked about them. "They have singing!" he exclaimed.

Every Bollywood film is a musical, with between 5 and 14 songs. No blockbuster special effects, no interplanetary spaceships, no lone American singlehandedly taking on armies of brown people -- just singing, and respect shown to mothers.

My personal history of Bollywood is entwined with my personal history of Bombay (which I refuse to call Mumbai), where I grew up in the 70's. Bollywood lives in the middle of its created dream: Bombay. There is the Bombay of the auteur Raj Kapoor, where migrants struggle to survive on the city's pitiless sidewalks; the Bombay of gangsters and cops, as in the superstar Amitabh Bachchan's "Deewaar" and "Zanjeer"; the Bombay of the striving middle class; the Bombay of yuppies. Bombay is a city whose contrasts are so extreme that only movies that make no claim to represent reality could do justice to it; a city where those confronted by difficult moral choices -- the loss of life or love -- burst into song.

Going to the movies was a family enterprise in Bombay. The women in my parents' household would pack samosas so we wouldn't have to buy them at the concession stand. This small economy would compensate for the expense of paying scalpers outside the cinemas, often the only way of getting tickets for a hit movie. During the slower songs, as much as a quarter of the audience might get up for refreshments. We were allowed to talk back to the screen, to clap and whistle and jeer, to throw coins in praise when we were particularly pleased.

When I moved to New York in 1977 at the age of 14, I walked around the streets of Jackson Heights singing Hindi movie songs with my friends. In a Hindi movie, emotion is communicated through song, because song is more potent than dialogue. When there's overwhelming emotion -- love, hatred, heartbreak -- spoken words don't suffice. They have to be sung, and the singer has to be transported, on the wings of her song, to the Alpine meadows of Switzerland if she's falling in love (the Swiss Alps are a substitute for troubled Kashmir, the Indian honeymoon paradise) or to a temple in a thunderstorm if her mother is about to die.

We watched the movies every chance we got, in the ramshackle Deluxe Cinema in Woodside, at the Bombay Theater on Queens Boulevard. When the first VCR's started arriving in the late 70's, we gathered with other Indian families, watching three three-hour Bollywood movies back to back, with samosas and tears and laughter. Even the car games we played were based around Bollywood. We played Antakshari, in which one person sang a few lines of a Bollywood song, and the next person had to begin another song with the last syllable of the preceding song. We never risked running out, as we carried so many of these songs within us.

Raj Kapoor gave me the perfect exile's song: "Mera Joota Hai Japani." Raj Kapoor sang it -- or rather, lip-synched it -- to the great playback singer Mukesh, in "Shree 420":

My shoes are Japanese
My pants English
On my head a red Russian cap
Still my heart is Indian.

When I am happy, I sing "Deewana hua Badal" ("The Maddened Clouds") from "Kashmir ki Kali," a song about the coming rains, set to the beat of a horse cart trundling across the Vale of Kashmir. When I'm sad, I sing "Bicchad Gaye" ("We Have Parted"). When I'm playful, I yell out "Maalish! Tel Maalish!" ("Massage! Oil Massage!") after the comic head masseur in "Pyaasa." When I want to express friendship, I sing "Yeh Dosti Hum Nahin Todenge" ("This Friendship, We'll Never Abandon"), which all boys growing up in India sang to one another, arms draped fraternally around one another's necks.

We Indians carry these songs around with us. They form our vocabulary of love and grief, from country to country. My aunt's family emigrated to Uganda from India a century ago; she now lives in England and has never been to India, but she listens mostly to Hindi movie songs. When I visited her house in Leicester once, I noticed that none of the children under 5 in her extended family spoke English. They spoke Gujarati and film Hindi; in their house, the TV was on almost all the time, with Hindi movies playing back to back on the VCR. The children, two or three generations removed from India, were living in this simulated Indiaworld.

At college at N.Y.U., I was vice president of the Indian students organization, and we organized regular showings of Hindi movies, driving out to Queens Boulevard to get the giant reels from Eros Entertainment. "Amar Prem" and "Pyaasa" were so popular in the Eisner and Lubin Auditorium that we had to show them twice. As the Indian-American girls watched the love stories and wept, they relaxed their defenses. They reached out for the boy from home. And when we were heartbroken, we turned to the dolorous Mohammed Rafi, or the ghazals -- lyric love songs -- sung by Jagjit & Chitra Singh or by Pankaj Udhas. Not film music, exactly, but close enough; the Urdu poetry expressed in extravagant fashion the torments of the heart: "It feels good to cry against these walls. . . . "

My uncle in Chicago, who has worked for 25 years in a home-furnishings factory, became popular in gatherings of Indians in suburban basements. "Give me the name of any song," he would challenge a hundred people after they had their samosas. "Kabhi Kabhie," they might say, and he would sing the song in its entirety. And they all sang with him -- the doctors, the grocers, the engineers, "Kabhi Kabhie," and their faces became soft and rosy in the singing. "You are truly an encyclopedia of old songs!" they would tell him.

At Indian-American weddings, the women of the family choreograph and perform Bollywood song numbers. Many of the Hindu rituals have merged with scenes drawn from such wedding movies as "Hum Aapke Hain Koun" ("What Am I to You"), essentially an extended wedding video with 14 song sequences. When we want to educate our kids in Indian culture, we take them to the temple -- or to the nearest suburban multiplex showing Bollywood movies. This has spawned a wave of Indian-American hopefuls who return to Bombay every year -- or go for the first time, since many of them were born in America -- to try to become stars. But very few succeed; the local producers take their money and laugh at their American accents and their naivete; in desperation, their doctor or software-magnate fathers finance their children's movies, hoping to launch them in Bollywood.

It was not until graduate school that I became cynical about Bollywood movies. I too began to think that the plots were weak, melodramatic. At the University of Iowa's student-run movie theater, the Bijou, I could see two movies for five dollars, most of them European. I was introduced to Renoir, Fellini, Fassbinder, De Sica. I became, for many years after that, something of a cinephile. When I returned to New York I haunted the repertory theaters -- the Thalia, Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, and, most of all, the Theater 80 St. Mark's.

The Theater 80 was not a fancy place. It was run by a very old man who owned the prints of all the films he showed, and he showed them over and over again, each film 10 or 20 times a year. This had worn down the prints of the older, more popular films, especially the Bergmans, so that the print skipped, the sound was out of sync for whole scenes and all kinds of dots, flares and blots held wild parties across the screen. Nobody complained. For nowhere else in New York was it possible to see two films for $7, if it was possible to see such films at all: Antonioni, John Ford, Bunuel, Truffaut.

After this wealth of the world's classic art cinema, the Indian movies seemed pointless and absurd to me (except for those of India's own new cinema -- Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and, for a while, Mani Kaul). It was only when I moved with my family to Bombay in 1998 that I began to get a sense of why Bollywood was important -- to the country and to me. There was a surge of national pride as our movies regularly made the list of top 10 box-office hits in the United Kingdom and started appearing in Blockbusters across the United States. It became acceptable -- in some parts, even hip -- to be Indian, which was not the case when I came to America in 1977. And I found that the Bollywood movies were, in the Indian context, progressive. They eliminated barriers between Hindus and Muslims and Christians ("Amar Akbar Anthony"); rich boys fell in love with poor girls ("Bobby"); untouchables were brought into patriotic service ("Lagaan," perhaps the first real crossover hit in the West).

The medium fostered new ways of looking at the caste system. And since Hindus and Muslims have always worked together in the determinedly secular Bombay film industry, new if not entirely accurate ways of looking at others, too. Growing up in Bombay with the movies, I had come to understand Muslims as lovable, Christian girls as flirtatious, Sikhs as loyally martial, Parsis as endearingly cracked. The movies trafficked in broad stereotypes, but they were, for the most part, good-natured stereotypes.

In 1998, I returned to Bombay to write a book on the city. I became involved in the writing of a big-budget movie, "Mission Kashmir," and got to know the industry from the inside. I was valued in Bollywood because I had stories. I would roam among the gangsters and the bar girls and bring their stories back to the moviemakers. The gangsters and bar girls would give me their stories because I would tell them how the movie people lived, what they wore, what they ate, whom they slept with (mostly their wives). In Bombay, where people live in compartmentalized bubbles, I became a messenger between worlds.

On one occasion, I went to meet Praveen Nischol, a film producer. He had heard me give a reading at a salon, and he wanted to talk about scripts I could write with him. "It has to be about something ordinary," he told me. "Onion prices. You and I can wonder why onions are so expensive, and then we discover that there's something more sinister behind it." We discussed the world of the beer bars, Bombay's version of geisha bars, which I'd investigated for my book. His last film, "English Babu, Desi Mem" ("English Gentleman, Local Girl"), had a bar dancer as the heroine and starred the superstar Shahrukh Khan. He had Shahrukh committed to doing one more film for him.

Nischol asked about my book, and I described it to him.

"I want to throw a couple of ideas at you," he said. "Let's make you the central character. An investigative journalist."

"Ah." I nodded.

"But more . . . action-packed."

One would hope so.

I met Shahrukh Khan, too. Like Tom Cruise, Khan can singlehandedly guarantee profit for a movie the day he signs on to it. Khan brings his own kinetic energy to his performances. I once watched him rehearse a scene in the film "Duplicate," in which he had to stab the picture of his enemies with a knife, repeatedly, in great anger. As he knifed at the picture, his face glistening with fake sweat, his eyes bloodshot, a lamp in the background burst into flame. The orange plastic filter over it had caught fire. There was not a single fire extinguisher around, and the workers put the lamp out by stamping on it with their feet. I couldn't help thinking of the great classical singer Tansen, who, in medieval times, caused lamps to light spontaneously with the power of his singing "Raga Deepak," "the Raga of Lamps."

But for the most part, as I met the movie people firsthand, they seemed smaller than life. They did their accounts, walked their children to school and worried about their digestion. They worked too hard when away on location to have the multiple affairs that movie magazines like "Stardust" reported in every issue. They spoke English well and Hindi badly. (The great secret of Hindi films is that most of the scripts are written in English; an Urdu dialogue writer usually has to be found to translate the dialogue and give it punch. As the writer Ashis Nandy points out, English has been around in India for 200 years; Hindi for 100 years.) I saw them in their homes, I saw them on the sets. I didn't like the sets. Most of the time, on a movie set, people wait. For a writer, it's like watching grass grow. Shahrukh Khan plays video games in his trailer; the others talk endlessly on their cellphones.

After I returned to America, I met up with some of Bollywood's stars again. A couple of weeks after 9/11, 16 of India's biggest stars got on an American airliner; 4 other passengers got off in fear. Anil Kapoor was reading a copy of Time with Osama bin Laden's picture on the cover; his manager advised him to fold the magazine so that the portrait wouldn't be visible. Aamir Khan reached for an orange and a passenger flinched. They were telling me these stories in the locker room of the Trenton hockey arena, one stop on their road show. They were going to tour 20 cities in 40 days, putting on a vaudeville act for their fans, immigrants from all the countries that love Bollywood. A song, followed by a comedy routine, followed by a re-enacted dramatic sequence from a hit film.

In the hockey arena, Aishwarya Rai, the world's second most beautiful woman according to Roger Ebert, was making herself up in the mirror of a bathroom in the basement, which doubled as her dressing room. We talked into the mirror; she talked to my reflection, I spoke to hers. Then she went onstage and I walked toward the backstage. A chorus girl with a purple ostrich-feather headdress, waiting on the steps for her turn on stage, had the hiccups. With each hiccup, her feathers quivered violently. Then the show began, and I was sitting right below the stage, with the photographers. Aishwarya came out clutching a red pillow embroidered with the words "I love you" and lifted it above her head. Then she saw me and tossed it lightly to me. I held it for half a second; then I heard the mighty, maddened roar. Thousands of screaming fans wanted that pillow, and hands were thrusting out behind me. Without a second thought, I tossed it over my back.

When we lived in Bombay, my son Gautama, then 4, sang "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai" and "Chal Mera Ghoda," in addition to "Barbie Girl" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." He was gathering his sources of pleasure from East and West. He was building his own vocabulary of Hindi film music. When he was in New York and missed Bombay, he sang "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai" -- which is loosely based on Archie Comics -- on the sidewalks of the Big Apple. An Indian boy in America, singing a Hindi song from an Indian movie imitation of an American comic book: the Ping-Pong game of kitsch. Along with the Bhagavad-Gita and Thoreau, this, too, has wings.

When we came back from Bombay in 2000, we enrolled Gautama at St. Ann's, a private school in Brooklyn. We were apprehensive about the school; it seemed to be full of rich white kids. How would it take our striving brown ones, with their accents, their utter lack of knowledge of American pop culture?

One parent was making a documentary film of Gautama's first-grade class. The interviewer asked various questions of the children: What's your favorite color? What's your favorite storybook? When he came to Gautama, he asked him, "What's your favorite movie?" "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai," my immigrant son said immediately. The name was flashed in subtitles, below Gautama's smiling face. None of his friends or their parents had any idea what he was talking about. But the elite school got used to it; the next year, for Gautama's second-grade play, his teacher mounted a Bollywood version of "The Ramayana," and my parents had tears in their eyes as they watched 17 mostly white, rich, private-school kids, dressed in sari scraps, dancing to the irresistible beats of songs from the movie "Lagaan" in a school in Brooklyn. Gautama was the golden deer, but Yoni was the wise sage, and Sarah and Sofia were the 10-headed demon Ravana, and Henry was Princess Sita. They were all doing dance moves that were a combination of the classical Bharat Natyam and the decidedly unclassical ones from Bollywood. The 13th-floor dance studio had become a Bombay movie theater. And the immense power of pop culture, the global appeal of Bollywood, had made the unfamiliar . . . family.

Suketu Mehta is the author of ''Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.''

Filmmakers hope to keep cameras rolling

2004-12-30T04:53:00.000-06:00

Dec. 27, 2004, 9:24AM

Filmmakers hope to keep cameras rolling

Movie insiders say Texas needs to offer incentives to keep business

By KELLEY SHANNON
Associated Press

RESOURCES

TEXAS MOVIES

The movie industry in Texas took hold in the 1990s. Some of the movies filmed in the state during that time: •The Alamo, 2003
•Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, 2001
•The Life of David Gale, 2001
•Traffic, 2000
•Miss Congeniality, 2000
•Spy Kids, 2000
•All the Pretty Horses, 1999
•The Faculty, 1998
•Selena, 1996
•Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, 1995
•Dazed and Confused, 1992
•JFK, 1991
•Slacker, 1990

Source: Texas Film Commission

AUSTIN - Cameras keep rolling on Texas movie sets, but nearby states are grabbing a piece of the action.

Directors Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater made films here in the past year. And Burnt Orange Productions, an upstart Austin for-profit venture that works with University of Texas film students, shot its first picture and plans many more.

Film-industry insiders, though, warn that the state must work to retain the film business that blossomed in the past decade or risk losing it to nearby states where financial incentives are attracting producers.

"Filmmakers tend to follow filmmakers. If there's a hot spot, they're going. New Orleans is a hot spot right now," said Tom Copeland, director of the Texas Film Commission.

The commission is looking at new ways to promote the Texas movie-making infrastructure. Specific proposals are expected in the 2005 state legislative session.

Economic impact

Austin city officials are working on similar strategies. A city study released in August pegged the economic impact of film and visual media on the city at $360 million annually.

MovieMaker magazine just named Austin the top location in the nation to live and make movies. Houston was No. 10.

Filmmakers often praise the diversity of locations near Austin and the fact that crews, equipment and studios are already in the city.

Texas gives moviemakers some sales-tax exemptions, but other states are "literally throwing money at people to get them to come there," Copeland said.

In Louisiana — where, unlike Texas, there is a state income tax — moviemakers can get investor tax credits and payroll credits.

New Mexico also provides tax incentives and recently announced funding to train film technicians.

Texas film-industry experts worry about losing the state's all-important crew base — the behind-the-scenes people who tend to sets, operate cameras and work in production.

"Our crews are leaving and going to work on films in Louisiana and New Mexico. I hear it almost every single day," said Carolyn Pfeiffer, president and chief executive of Burnt Orange Productions.

Hardworking crews

Producer Elizabeth Avellan, who makes movies in Austin with her husband, Rodriguez, said professional, hard-working crew members in Texas are a big attraction.

Rarely, she said, do they encounter "whining" or "drama" from crews.

"Drama takes a lot of time, and time is money in the movie business," Avellan said. "When you have crews that are professional and know what they're doing, you get it done faster."

The couple's Texas-made films include the Spy Kids movies.

Last spring they filmed Sin City in the area, and they are working on The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, set for release June 10.

Rodriguez and Avellan live in Austin, where they operate their Troublemaker Studios, and shoot 80 percent or more of their movies in Texas. They don't intend to be lured to neighboring states, Avellan said.

But Texas should try to persuade filmmakers not to flee, she said, praising the bipartisan movie-industry support shown by Texas leaders.

As of early December, $304.7 million from 51 projects flowed into film production in Texas this year, Copeland said.

Making choice easier

State and local officials are well aware of that economic impact.

Republican Gov. Rick Perry joined governors from the three other most populous states this year to urge Congress to stop filmmakers from making movies in other countries because it is so much cheaper.

The governors asked Congress to allow immediate expensing of production costs for some U.S.-made films.

Every production dollar generates $2 to $5 in a local economy, the governors said.

In the Austin area, Burnt Orange Productions has plans to become a larger part of the economy.

Burnt Orange, working with the University of Texas Film Institute, wants to produce eight to 10 commercially viable, feature-length films in its first three years, in the budget range of $500,000 to $3 million per picture.

Almost all the movies will be filmed in Central Texas.

About 30 students — some paid but most earning internship credits — worked on the recently filmed Burnt Orange movie Dot, a dark teenage thriller set in Connecticut but made in Austin.

The film will be finished in March but so far has no distributor or release date.

"Our goal is that eventually students will be taking on roles of greater and greater importance," Pfeiffer said.

Another inspiration for young filmmakers is the presence of big-name directors and producers in Texas, Copeland said.

Projects by Rodriguez, Linklater and Mike Judge were among the state's major productions this year.

"They're cult favorites," he said. "The fact that they're from Austin and they did these things, it's a huge, huge deal. That means that you have this environment of people going, 'If he can do that, I can do that.' "

Politics and Prostitution: Israeli Filmmakers Chart Broad, Gritty Territory

2004-12-28T05:46:00.000-06:00

Joseph Cedar directed "Campfire," a film about the settlement movement.

A scene with Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

December 13, 2004
Politics and Prostitution: Israeli Filmmakers Chart Broad, Gritty Territory
By STEVEN ERLANGER

TEL AVIV, Dec. 12 - Tiny countries with big problems tend to make somber, self-conscious films. In this instance, at least, Israel is no exception.

Still, Israeli directors are making more of an effort to entertain as well, working harder to fit lifelike characters around bigger themes of sexual and religious politics.

One of the most successful is perhaps among the least likely: an American-born Orthodox director, Joseph Cedar, whose portrayal of religious settlers has brought cries of betrayal down upon his head.

His second film, "Campfire," released in Israel this year, is a story of sexual yearning and awakening, set in 1981, as a widow with two daughters seeks companionship and community in the early settler movement. The eldest daughter is saucy, the other meek. When the younger daughter is molested during a holiday campfire, it sets off confrontations and quandaries that cause the widow to reject what she comes to see as a repressive communalism.

The leader of the settlers urges her to hush up the incident to protect the community; unsurprisingly, she chooses to support her daughter.

In a slightly awkward effort to be uplifting, given its themes, the film ends cheerily, with the widow finding contentment with the only man in the film who is nice to her.

"She, who wants to fit in, needs someone who has given up on fitting in," Mr. Cedar says in an interview. "They awaken something for each other."

Mr. Cedar, his eye on the larger world of film distribution, insists that he could have set this family drama anywhere, and that the fundamental human themes supersede the intricate Israeli context. "The big trick in making any foreign movie is that it must be specific enough so local audiences don't feel you're turning them into something exotic, but universal enough so that others will recognize themselves," he said.

But this insider's view of the early days of the settler movement is inevitably political. It is also fundamentally brave.

What interests him, he says, are "characters who are able to break out of the community's tribal embrace." But he also admits that the cynicism, hypocrisy and elitism of his fictionalized settlers and their leader are meant to comment on the current situation in Israel, where the settler patriarch Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, has prompted fury by his desire to dismantle all Israeli settlements in Gaza and four tiny ones in the West Bank. "There is something about our reality now that is undeniably influenced by the settlers' movement," Mr. Cedar said. "I resent that, and that resentment is there in the movie."

His first film, "Time of Favor" (2000), was more of a potboiler-thriller about a plan - born of misconstrued religious teaching and unrequited love - to blow up the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine.

The anger his first film created among his own tribe of national-religious Israelis helped provide the spark for this one. "People said, 'When we finally have one of our own, why do you show such things?' I thought I was making a film as a representative of a tribe and found people angry with me. I needed to think about how much I needed to be accepted and loved by that tribe. And this movie is a response," he said.

At the center of "Campfire" is the effort to silence scandal. There has been a similar response to the film, Mr. Cedar said. "That's the flak I'm getting: 'How can you put this out? It's a sacrilege!' The hard core can only deal with me as someone who has left the fold and is betraying confidentiality. But it's about me, too. I'm part of the fold."

"Campfire" ("Medurat Hashevet" in Hebrew) won the top Israeli prize for best feature film this year from a field of 24, and is Israel's nominee for the foreign-language category of the Academy Awards. (It is still seeking a United States distributor.)

With few exceptions, the Oscar has gone to obscure foreign films, "but it can make a difference, especially in the United States, where people pay attention to prizes," said Ruth Diskin, who distributes many Israeli documentaries and features. The last Israeli film to be an Oscar finalist was "Beyond the Walls," 20 years ago.

Israeli films tend to be made on the European model, as joint productions of various companies, with some money from state finances for homegrown cinema. Israel had about $13.6 million to distribute this year.

"Campfire" received money from the state, which provided about 70 percent of its budget; from two television channels, one of them cable; and from private financing. It was made for about $900,000 compared, for example, with the multimillion budget for Baz Luhrmann's two-minute advertisement for Chanel No. 5, starring Nicole Kidman.

Mr. Cedar, 36, came to Israel at the age of 5 when his parents emigrated to Israel from New York. He attended Israeli schools and served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, but then went to New York University's film school, graduating in 1995.

"Time of Favor" was also the Israeli nominee for the foreign-language film Oscar. The critic Stephen Holden praised it in The New York Times for "its underlying concern with the consequences of words and with the complicated emotions fueling terrorist acts." But he also said the film was "quite crudely directed."

Mr. Cedar has improved, it is fair to say. In The Jerusalem Post, Talya Halkin called him "arguably the Jewish state's first-ever Oscar-class filmmaker."

He has also managed to make two films about settlers without a single Palestinian, which comes up a lot, he says, at foreign festivals. "Being an Israeli at a European film festival is one long apology," he said. "The European press expects you to be in exile, and to meet their expectations is to be self-hating."

There have been other strong films this year, none of them very lighthearted. Two of the best deal in different ways with prostitution and the exploitation of women in Israeli society. Amos Gitai, 54, one of the country's best and best-known directors, did "Promised Land," a feature with a documentary feel about the transport of women from the economic mess of the former Soviet Union (in this case Estonia, although Moldova is the most prevalent example) through the Sinai Desert to tatty destinations in Haifa and Tel Aviv.

"I was looking for fields of Jewish-Arab cooperation," Mr. Gitai said. "There's music, and then crime. And Israelis try to be excellent in everything they do, whether it's high-tech or the smuggling of women for sex." In a well-researched tale of exploitation, the film mixes Bedouins in Sinai with native and newly arrived Israelis from the former Soviet Union. Internationally known actresses like Hanna Schygulla and Anne Parillaud take gritty roles, while Rosamund Pike, a former Bond girl, plays a mystifying character - a tourist or semijournalist who identifies with the prostitutes and joins them.

Even harsher, if possible, is "Or," a film by Keren Yedaya, about an H.I.V.-infected prostitute and her and horrified teenage daughter, named Or, played with awkward grace by Dana Ivgy. This is an enormously angry film: men here are evil and ridiculous, made childish or brutal by sex. But the tractlike nature of the film is redeemed by good acting and an unsweetened look at the mother, who gives the same, insincere patter to her daughter as to her clients.

"Many people, feminists included, choose to maintain the illusion of choice, or the illusion of the power of women who work as prostitutes," Ms. Yedaya, 32, said. Or does not want to become a prostitute, but is battered repeatedly and broken, she said. "Or," which means skin in Hebrew, is French for gold, and this French co-production is also known as "Mon Trésor," or "My Treasure." Or's descent into prostitution will strike some as forced or diagrammatic, but we're a long way from "Pretty Woman."

The Season of Humane, Nuanced On-Screen Sex

2004-12-28T05:44:00.000-06:00

In Bill Condon's "Kinsey," starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney sex is by definition unconventional.

Diego Lopez Calvin/Sony Pictures Classics
Pedro Almodóvar's "Bad Education," with Gael García Bernal.

December 12, 2004
The Season of Humane, Nuanced On-Screen Sex
By A. O. SCOTT

There's a lot of loose talk going around these days about sexual morality. It seems that the notion that sex is a private, intimate matter - a dubious and persistent idea for at least the last three centuries of Western history - has been decisively refuted once again. With characteristic overstatement and lack of subtlety, the opinionizing class, from Sunday public-affairs blabbers to bloviating bloggers, has turned its attention to matters like Nicolette Sheridan's dropped towel and Tom Wolfe's prurient, disapproving peek at the casual promiscuity that supposedly runs rampant on American college campuses.

Predictably enough, the picture of American culture that emerges is of a polarized nation in which permissiveness and Puritanism battle over the bodies and souls of the innocent. Each side, convinced of its righteousness, demonizes the other. Depending on whom you choose to believe, we are threatened either by Internet pornographers and other peddlers of perversion, or else by prudes and hypocrites who want to drag us back to the 50's, or the Middle Ages, or some other time we can pretend was less obsessed with sex than our own.

While the battle between these opposing forces was dramatized with excruciating literal-mindedness on screen this year by John Waters in "A Dirty Shame," some other recent movies have provided refuge from the orgy of alarm and indignation that dominates public discourse on sexuality. Bill Condon's "Kinsey" and Pedro Almodóvar's "Bad Education" approach sex with more nuance than noise, reminding us that moral inquiry, sexual and otherwise, involves at least as much anxious questioning as confident prescribing, and that while sex may upset households and divide societies, its true battleground is the self.

This is not to say that either movie rises above the political turmoil currently surrounding sex, or that they have been spared the moralism of the times. "Bad Education," with a semi-explicit scene of gay male sex and a plot that includes the sexual abuse of a child by a priest, could not escape the censorious (and commercially limiting) NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. "Kinsey," meanwhile, has revived long-simmering controversies over the life and work of its subject, whose most vocal critics hold him responsible for unleashing a flood of licentiousness and lust into the wholesome American mainstream. It would be silly to pretend that Mr. Condon and Mr. Almodóvar manage - or even try - to remain neutral in such a polarized cultural environment. But to attack - or, for that matter, to applaud - their films for taking sides would be to slight the complexities of their work and to simplify its subject. For both films insist that our habitual, binary ways of thinking about sexual politics - as a matter of for or against, gay or straight, repression or liberation - are hopelessly inadequate.

Maybe everybody knows this, and pretends otherwise. What distinguishes these two films is not only their embrace of the confusion that surrounds human sexuality, but the humane clarity they bring to that confusion. In Mr. Condon's account, Alfred C. Kinsey is a crusader against hypocrisy and superstition, a scientific warrior going into battle against what he disparagingly calls "morality disguised as fact." But the movie's wisdom comes from its ability to combine admiration for Kinsey's scientific zeal with a sense not only of his personal blind spots, but also of the limitations of scientific knowledge as means of understanding sex. Kinsey's refusal to judge any of his interview subjects may have been methodologically sound, but his detachment from the emotional consequences and moral implications of his own actions makes him, in the film, a flawed and dramatically interesting hero.

As Mr. Condon construes it, Kinsey's determination to bring sex into quantitative, empirical focus, to marry physiology and statistics, was both grandly idealistic and curiously myopic. The experiments he conducted with his research assistants and their wives have a queasy, tawdry fascination that makes their avowed scientific purpose seem like something of a pretense. And his desire to disentangle sex from its attendant feelings seems to defy both logic and experience. In a crucial scene, Kinsey's researcher Clyde Martin (whose wife's affair with a colleague Kinsey had encouraged) challenges his boss's belief that sex is something you can study in isolation. "It's the whole thing," he says. "And it can tear you wide open."

Mr. Almodóvar would in all likelihood agree. In "Bad Education," the effects of a child's violation by a priest are symbolized by an image of the boy's face ripping in half, a sundering that foreshadows the later unraveling of his personality. But Mr. Almodóvar's film is more than a melodrama of lost innocence. Like "Kinsey," it is at least in part an attempt to understand the ethical dimensions of desire. As he was in his previous film, "Talk to Her," Mr. Almodóvar shows himself to be almost infinitely tolerant of human weakness, but this is not to say that in his world anything goes. On the contrary, "Bad Education," like "Kinsey," tries to imagine sexual decency in the absence of taboos - as a matter of how we treat each other rather than of how external authorities require us to behave.

In his early career, Mr. Almodóvar was himself something of a Kinsey-like figure - a symbol of the heady and dangerous freedom that followed the end of Franco's dictatorship. Like parts of the Kinsey Report, his films of the 1980's were like a catalog of the outré and the provocative, aimed at dislocating tradition-bound ideas of propriety and normalcy. His latest work, like Mr. Condon's, provokes both feeling and thought. "Kinsey" and "Bad Education" are testaments to the artistic maturity of their directors, and tests of the maturity of their audience.

Pedro Almodóvar's transgender outlaws

2004-12-28T05:37:00.000-06:00

culturebox
The Other Women
Pedro Almodóvar's transgender outlaws: A video slide show.
By June Thomas
Posted Monday, Dec. 13, 2004, at 12:19 PM PT

Pedro Almodóvar is a director who loves to épater bourgeois movie-goers. After a filmography littered with sadomasochistic lesbians, smack-shooting nuns, and comatose toreras, the most shocking element of his latest movie, Bad Education, is the absence of female characters. In his first 14 films, Almodóvar established himself as a "specialist in women," famously constellating his films around dominant leading ladies—Carmen Maura, Marisa Paredes, Victoria Abril, Cecilia Roth—and brilliant, oddball supporting actresses like Chus Lampreave and Rossy de Palma. In Bad Education, women-born-women are all but absent; when they do appear, it is fleetingly, as grieving put-upon mothers or slightly batty aunts. The "real" female roles are played by transvestites and transsexuals.

Perhaps this is a natural progression. It has always been the theater of womanhood that appeals to Almodóvar. In a 1981 interview, he said, "I write better for women than for men, who are dramatically boring for me."

In the Almodóvarian universe, the dichotomy of womanhood isn't madonna-whore, it's housewife-superstar. (Now, there's a cross-dresser made for Almodóvar.) His women are either mousey, harried types—the nuns of Dark Habits, the tragic housewife of What Have I Done to Deserve This? who dreams of owning a curling iron, the dowdy mother of Bad Education—or glamorous, over-the-top vamps with high heels, big hair, and Hollywood wardrobes. Clothes and cosmetics confer happiness—or, at least, confidence. In the opening scenes of The Flower of My Secret, Leo is forced to dress down and take to the streets asking strangers to help her remove her too-tight boots; when her friends see her, they flee the sight of a woman so lost. To be plain and unadorned is to be helpless and unattractive. Almodóvar's women appear most comfortable when they are painted and preened and, preferably, on stage.

Or maybe Almodóvar's just into dressing up. Throughout his career, he has used representatives of three groups to explore Spanish culture: priests and nuns, bullfighters, and actors. Again and again, his films depict the rituals associated with putting on the costumes that confer authority: priests donning robes for mass; nuns adjusting their habits; matadors putting on the suit of lights; and, most commonly, actors and actresses making up and dressing—or undressing—themselves for a performance.

Given this obsession with exaggerated versions of womanhood and the rituals of dressing, as well as his roots in the underground and gay culture, it shouldn't be surprising that Almodóvar has used drag queens, transvestites, and transsexuals to explore questions of authenticity, ambition, and romanticism. Click to see a video slide show of some of Almodóvar's key transgender moments.

June Thomas is Slate's West Coast editor. You can e-mail her at intpapers@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110904/

In Dubai, a Festival Is Born. Next, an Industry?

2004-12-28T05:22:00.000-06:00

Rabih Moghrabi/Agence France-Presse and Getty Images
The Egyptian film stars Lebleba, right, and Elham Shahin, left, at the film festival's opening ceremony last week.

Kamran Jebreili/The Associated Press
The Madinat Jumeira Hotel, where most of the Dubai festival fare - a mix of Hollywood, Bollywood and indie Arab movies - was shown.

December 14, 2004
In Dubai, a Festival Is Born. Next, an Industry?
By HASSAN M. FATTAH

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Dec. 13 - Tinseltown it's not. But Dubai, a swiftly rising city of cranes and skyscrapers on the Persian Gulf, has highly ambitious plans for the silver screen. And frustrated Arab filmmakers are hoping that this is their moment, too.

The weeklong $10 million Dubai International Film Festival, which ended on Saturday, was billed as a showcase of Arab and international films. Coinciding with the comparatively lower-budget Marrakesh and Cairo film festivals, the Dubai version, with 13,000 people attending, was even talked up as a spur to starting a film industry here.

About 75 films were shown, together meant to appeal to Dubai's diverse community of Asians, Arabs and Westerners. But more than anything, the festival was all Dubai: a mix of Disneyland and Las Vegas. Like most things in this desert emirate, the 50-yard-long red carpet leading into the main festival hall was brand new. Even the location, a resort complex built to resemble an old-fashioned mud-brick city, seemed appropriate - more movie lot than luxury hotel. The program - indie, Hollywood and Bollywood films - was meant to please. And big American movies, like "The Grudge," "Polar Express" and "Ocean's Twelve," proved the biggest draws.

About the only unhappy people were Arab filmmakers, who fancied themselves as the stars of the program. For much of the week, nearly 50 of them wrestled with their fundamental problem: lack of support. In screenings, talks and frequent informal sessions, Arab auteurs flown in by the festival made no secret of their frustration with their moneyed hosts and with the perceived apathy of potential Arab backers.

"I'm sick of co-productions and going for money from Europe and the U.S.," said Annemarie Jacir, a Palestinian-American whose short film, "Like Twenty Impossibles," about Palestinians navigating Israeli checkpoints, played to packed audiences. Despite all the talk of building bridges with the West, Ms. Jacir noted, it would be better to build them closer to home. "What there really needs to be is a bridge between the gulf and Arab filmmakers," she said, speaking about the wealthy Persian Gulf region.

Abdul Hamid Juma, chief executive of Dubai Media City, a government-sponsored media free-trade zone that sponsored the festival, said he hoped to have an answer for the directors soon. Media City - similar to an office park but for publishing, broadcasting and entertainment companies - intends to create a Dubai Film Commission to support producers, a Dubai Location Management Commission to encourage film production, and an infrastructure and a Dubai Film Fund to finance movie projects.

"Only Dubai can do this at such a critical time," Mr. Juma said.

Blame the dearth of financial support on politics, said Mohamed Maklouf, who organized the festival's Arab shorts program. With authoritarian governments running much of the Arab world, few are likely to back independent cinema, Mr. Maklouf said, because, "Our leaders are terrified of the moving image."

But many other problems dog Arab filmmakers, including distribution of their product in the region. Movie distribution is often handled by the equivalent of cartels in Arab countries, and unless filmmakers are connected to them, they can be denied distribution and thus a take at the box office. The subject matter of many independent films does not sell either. Many Arab films, says Taher Houchi, a Moroccan-Berber filmmaker, live on the festival circuit but cannot make it on their own.

The largest producer of Arabic-language films is Egypt, which releases between 30 and 40 feature films a year, said an Arab film critic, Essam Zakarea. Known mainly for their adherence to formula and to slapstick, Egyptian films are made by a handful of small and midsize producers, and have budgets of well under $1 million each. They do, however, make it onto DVD and video CD (an inexpensive format on CD-ROM used throughout Asia and the Middle East) from Djibouti to Iraq.

Filmmakers in countries with nascent film industries like Tunisia and Morocco can receive money from their governments, but they are comparatively small sums. Tunisia has a fund of about $500,000, which it uses to help finance three or four films a year, said Nawfel Saheb-Ettaba, a Tunisian film director who produced a feature-length movie with almost two-thirds of the money coming from the government.

The vast majority of Arabic-language films, especially those that reach the West, are made with European or private money. And that, many filmmakers say, has its own price.

"The reason this film exists is because of French cinema," said Kamel Cherif, a Tunisian-born filmmaker, about his short coming-of-age movie "Sign of Belonging." The film, which examines both East and West through the eyes of a Tunisian boy who faces circumcision, was made largely with French government money. The 30-minute movie cost $200,000 and won the award for best short film at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this year.

But, Mr. Cherif said, he paid a price for that support. A co-producer was added to work with him, and he had to do most of the post-production work in France at a significantly higher cost, which ate into his budget.

"It becomes a real problem because the Europeans are beginning to put controls" on films in exchange for financial support, Mr. Cherif said, adding, "I would hope that one day a film like this would be funded by an Arab." An Arab would have understood the subject matter better, Mr. Cherif said, and helped him to produce a more authentic product.

Can Dubai come to the rescue? Mr. Juma said it could, with a bit of time. "I don't want people to come here and shoot the desert or terrorist movies," Mr. Juma said. "I want to create an industry."

Filming the life of erotic researcher Alfred Kinsey, director Bill Condon finds it's déjà vu all over again

2004-11-06T17:52:00.001-06:00

Filming the life of erotic researcher Alfred Kinsey, director Bill Condon finds it's déjà vu all over again
Sex, Actually
by Jessica Winter
November 2nd, 2004 10:45 AM

Sex is comedy: Filmmaker Bill Condon (center) with actors Liam Neeson and Laura Linney
(photo: Bill Condon)

"I don't know what attracts me to biopics because I don't like them that much," says Bill Condon, who has followed Gods and Monsters, his portrait of Frankenstein director James Whale, with Kinsey, a look at the eroto-taxonomist whose bestselling fire-starter Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) threw the first sparks of the sexual revolution. "In this case," says the director, "I had to avoid that deadly dreary biopic thing, but still show how an unlikely person in an unlikely place in an unlikely time took this project on." That is to say, how Alfred Kinsey—the son of a zealously Methodist family, a man more than halfway through his twenties before he lost his virginity—became the pansexual founder of the devoutly unorthodox Institute for Sex Research, located in buttoned-up mid-century Indiana.

In Kinsey (opening November 12), Condon, who won the adapted-screenplay Oscar for Gods and Monsters, sidesteps the "biopic thing" with a disciplined formal conceit: The film takes shape as Kinsey's sexual case history, as if the man of science (Liam Neeson) were one of his own research subjects. Amassing material for the script, Condon sought out Kinsey's surviving colleagues and posed his share of delicate queries about their mentor, who didn't blanch at turning himself and his co-workers into lab rats of human desire. "I spoke with Paul Gebhard, played by Tim Hutton in the movie, which was incredibly helpful," Condon recalls. "I could ask what felt like awkward questions—you know, 'What was sex night like at the Kinseys'?'—and he was so matter-of-fact about it all. There's such a great openness and nonjudgmental demeanor there, and I got a little glimpse into how they managed to make people feel comfortable when they were discussing these things."

A policy of nonjudgment perhaps also defined the fascinating open-door marriage of Alfred and Clara Kinsey (Laura Linney), in which both partners pursued other lovers—and sometimes shared them, in the case of Kinsey assistant Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard). "That's the crisis moment in the film, when Kinsey admits to his wife that he's having an affair with a man," Condon says. "The bisexual aspect of it is almost beside the point. It's an archetypal situation—and Kinsey wrote about it—how to navigate the pressures of monogamy on a long-standing relationship. There's a myth in American movies that's as strong today as ever, that there exists out there a soul mate for you who will also fulfill all your sexual needs over an entire lifetime. And if you don't find that person, then somehow you've failed in life. This is something that a lot of people in committed relationships have to face, and we just don't talk about it much."

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, the English author of Sex, the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (1998), says, "Nobody can know the true nature of any marriage, this one in particular. Kinsey was a secretive man, and he didn't show his emotions easily. The difficulty in portraying him accurately is that you somehow have to take into account the people who saw in him a clear vein of kindness and sympathy as well as the people who only found him irritating, abrasive."

"There are a lot of stories about Kinsey in a social situation, where he would just boom at people in a mini-lecture—he always wanted a teacher-student relationship," Condon says. "It worried me that we were putting somebody like that at the center of a movie, because you can really grow impatient with him." (It only helps, of course, to cast the strapping and charismatic Neeson in the role.) "I was also startled by what a peacock he became once he got famous, and how much he enjoyed the limelight," Condon adds. "When you read about Gore Vidal spotting him in gay bars—now, he was there working, but the idea that this guy could become so part of the homosexual elite culture of New York in the '50s, and just assume that no one would know about it, that surprised me. He took real risks."

A forthright depiction of a knotty and sometimes disquieting life and career, Kinsey aims for a popular audience, and is thereby bound to make some theatergoers uneasy—or even hostile, given that right-wing usual suspects like Judith Reisman and Concerned Women for America have already attacked the film for spotlighting a dangerous deviant. (Reisman insists that Kinsey solicited and encouraged, rather than simply tabulated, the pedophilic acts recorded in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.) "There's this crazy notion that if certain interests can destroy his reputation, then somehow the progress we've made since 1948 can be reversed," Condon says. "When I look at Kinsey's work I see all the ways we've advanced, most obviously through the women's movement and the gay movement. I'm an openly gay filmmaker and I don't exist in Kinsey's lifetime—that's just a fact. I'm always struck by how far we've come, but I'm also struck by how these controversies keep repeating themselves."

"This film is coming out at a very curious moment that echoes Kinsey's own time," Gathorne-Hardy says. "The religious right is very vocal, as they were in the '50s when they claimed that Kinsey was undermining the American family. And though bombs aren't going to fall on our cities or your cities, there's a frightening feeling of a warlike atmosphere that Bush has stirred up, and that harkens back to the Cold War."

Once more into the breach, then, for Alfred Kinsey—though the stakes may be even higher this time around, as Condon points out. "The fringe people who attack Kinsey always make the same leap, that talking about something is the same as endorsing it, but this is life-or-death stuff," says the director, who cites President Bush's unrealistic emphasis on abstinence education in allocating funds to fight AIDS in Africa. "The Kinsey Institute is now involved in research on condom use, and 40 percent of people they sampled don't know how to use them, including a surprising percentage who put them on after they have sex. All the attempts to impose morality on science, whether it's sex ed or stem cell research, are exactly what Kinsey faced in his day."

Young filmmakers refuse to play it safe

2004-11-06T17:52:00.000-06:00

THE YOUNG AND RESTLESS: David Gordon Green made 'Undertow,' one of a crop of daring independent films currently in theaters.
VINCENT KESSLER/REUTERS

from the November 05, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1105/p12s02-almo.html

Young filmmakers refuse to play it safe
By David Sterritt | Film critic of The Christian Science Monitor

TORONTO - "Ray" and "Shark Tale" have a lot of differences. But in one crucial way they're as similar as can be: They tap into conventional patterns of Hollywood screen storytelling.

Every plot twist, character trait, and line of dialogue comes straight from the Screenwriting 101 playbook. So do their basic themes, from sibling problems to the power of celebrity.

If you and I ran a major Hollywood studio, we'd probably play it just as safe, sticking with modest variations of time-tested formulas.

But independent filmmaking has become an important force, allowing for human-scaled productions with no moguls or bosses calling the shots. A number of these debuted at the Toronto Film Festival earlier in the fall.

With occasional exceptions, such as "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "The Passion of the Christ," even the most profitable of these pictures fall far short of the grosses earned by full-fledged studio productions. As the trade paper Variety reports, the DreamWorks animation "Shark Tale" pulled in almost $182 million in its first three weeks. By contrast, the Utah-made teenpic "Napoleon Dynamite" earned around $40 million in more than 19 weeks.

Without those little pictures, though, there would be no real alternative to Hollywood fare. So it's encouraging as well as important that a growing number of mostly young mavericks are keeping the indie scene alive - not only making movies, but pushing and promoting them until they actually arrive in theaters.

Once there, the films may not flourish. "If anything," says Harvey Karten, director of the New York Film Critics Online association, "the moviegoing public seeks films of lesser challenge than ever before, with oddball pics like 'Primer' and 'Tarnation' shown only in a few sophisticated urban centers." This contrasts with earlier periods of cinema history, Dr. Karten adds. "German Expressionism of the 1920s embraced a bigger break from traditional fare."

"Think of the 1920 masterwork 'The Golem,' from which less challenging features like dumbed-down 'Frankenstein' evolved," he says.

Still, it's worth noting the healthy number of unconventional features now playing. Examples include David Gordon Green's dark "Undertow," about a Southern man on the run from a murderous relative; Jonathan Caouette's documentary "Tarnation," a confessional account of the filmmaker's life; Shane Carruth's fantasy "Primer," a prizewinner at the Sundance Film Festival last winter; David O. Russell's philosophical "I * Huckabees," about "existential detectives" and their clients; and Alexander Payne's happy-sad "Sideways," a superbly acted comedy-drama that cements Mr. Payne's reputation as a skyrocketing directorial star.

A big asset of individualistic filmmakers like these is newfangled technology, which allows them to sidestep cookie-cutter effects without raising their budgets too high.

"I * Huckabees" has visual moments as dreamlike as anything in a "Matrix" movie, but you rarely get the sense that Mr. Russell is relying on exotic (and expensive) images for their own sake.

The amount Mr. Carruth spent on "Primer" was $7,000 or so, less than pocket money for the average Hollywood production. And that's untold riches compared with "Tarnation," which Mr. Caouette reportedly made for an absurdly low $218.32, using the iMovie computer program to organize film and video snippets he'd been saving since he was 11.

What makes directors like these not just clever but audacious is their willingness to "monkey with structure," as film essayist Phillip Lopate puts it.

Their heroes appear to be experimental types like Paul Thomas Anderson, of "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights" fame, and Quentin Tarantino, whose "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill" epics take wild risks with cinematic time, space, and logic.

"I * Huckabees" is a good example. It has several major characters: a corporate yuppie, a thoughtful firefighter, three "existential detectives," and an environmentalist who's mystified by coincidences involving an African man he keeps running into.

The film weaves them into a story that requires close attention, lest one misunderstand key story points - such as why Dustin Hoffman's face occasionally morphs into a sort of Rubik's Cube floating freely in the air.

With moneymakers like "Flirting With Disaster" and "Three Kings" under his belt, Russell can attract A-list talents like Mr. Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, who play the detectives, and Jude Law, who portrays the yuppie. What's drawn attention to "I * Huckabees" is less its cast, however, than its off-the-wall ideas, many of them more offbeat than most major studios would want to back. Its main American distributor is Fox Searchlight Pictures, a "specialty" outfit.

"Primer" is a fantasy so intricate that it puzzles its own writer, director, and star, as I reported from the Toronto festival, where Carruth admitted his own uncertainties after a screening greeted with both cheering and head-scratching.

Moviegoers may not understand its tale of two time-machine inventors who can't figure out the details of their own gizmo. Carruth is banking on the notion that you'll enjoy the attempt, though - and so is ThinkFilm, the kind of distributor that Miramax used to be, hunting for unusual fare to serve moviegoers who've decided thinking about a movie can be as enjoyable as watching it.

"Tarnation," a sort of glorified home movie by a sort of dysfunctional genius, is an outpouring of Caouette's autobiography as captured in footage of himself, his family, and his friends.

It raises the longstanding ethical question of where to draw the line when revealing private moments - a line that many documentaries, from last year's "Capturing the Friedmans" to the 1975 classic "Grey Gardens," have been accused of transgressing. But cinematically, "Tarnation" is so flat-out unprecedented that even skeptics have been impressed.

One is Internet reviewer Gabriel Shanks, who slammed it as a "bloated ... arthouse version of a reality show," yet called it a "fascinating" movie all the same.

Love it or hate it, you must admit there's nothing else like it, and that puts Caouette squarely in the risk-taking vanguard. "Tarnation" is onscreen thanks to Wellspring, the company that brought us such unprecedented fare as Steven Soderbergh's bizarre "Schizopolis" and the Russian masterpiece "Russian Ark," among many others.

All the movies I've mentioned take more than their share of chances. And there are films just as daring now waiting in the wings: Todd Solondz's controversial "Palindromes," which uses multiple actresses to play the part of a badly confused adolescent, and Lodge Kerrigan's intense "Keane," which dissects the psyche of a grieving father.

These movies don't have distributors yet, but the high reputations of both directors - established by "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Clean, Shaven" respectively - mean they're likely to be in theaters soon.

If so, the adventures of adventurous filmmaking will continue.

While Hollywood battles over blockbusters, indies vie for sleeper crown.

2004-11-06T17:50:00.000-06:00

from the May 21, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0521/p13s02-almo.html

The little films that could
While Hollywood battles over blockbusters, indies vie for sleeper crown.

By Stephen Humphries | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

If Mark Urman has his way, this summer's sleeper-hit movie will be a docudrama about ... camels. A "dysfunctional family" of camels in Mongolia, to be precise.

Mr. Urman, whose company Thinkfilm is distributing "The Story of the Weeping Camel," believes their live-action movie will appeal to the audience that flocked to last year's breakout documentary hit, "Winged Migration."

"The film is utterly delightful, having all of the virtues and thematic resonances of a classic Disney animated feature like 'Bambi,' or 'Dumbo,' or 'The Lion King' in its emphasis on a child animal having some sort of maternal trauma and trying to make its way in the world," says Urman, calling from the Cannes Film Festival in France.

Selling a film with a protagonist that doesn't speak (but spits an awful lot) requires an innovative marketing strategy - and Thinkfilm believes it has one. The company has entered into a promotional partnership with National Geographic, because the magazine's 6 million subscribers are likely to be attracted to the film's Gobi Desert setting. If National Geographic's constituency embraces the June release, they could generate enough buzz to get this camel over the hump in a crowded movie season.

Increasingly, more independent movies are adopting similar models of grass-roots marketing. Unable to compete with the multimillion-dollar advertising budgets of studio blockbusters, small movies are instead targeting localized niche audiences as a way to gain traction. That platform allows a film to open small and then potentially build momentum through word of mouth, just as "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" did two years ago by initially making a splash in the Greek-American community. That movie went on to become the most profitable romantic comedy in history.

"If you preach to the converted first, but then you get people talking, and then you get the mainstream media talking about you, you become a breakout hit," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a Los Angeles company that tracks box office figures.

Last year, "Bend It Like Beckham" did just that. The hit comedy about girl soccer players courted a core audience by screening the film to teams of Mia Hamm wannabes. Word of the film's feel-good vibe soon spread beyond high-school sports fields and the film took in $34 million. Since then, others have tried to mimic that strategy.

Author John Grisham is personally distributing "Mickey," a $6 million baseball film he wrote, by targeting screenings at Little Leaguers and their families. Another current release, "Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius," similarly reached out to the Professional Golf Association to promote the biopic about the amateur who ruled the fairways during the 1920s.

"Very often the philosophy is that if a film is for a specialized audience, then you should limit the exposure, because you're giving away tickets," says Urman, Thinkfilm's president of US distribution. "We believe that every person who sees the film prior to its opening ... can be a walking advertisement for the film."

Others are getting wise to the potential of targeting a specific ethnic group. "A Day Without a Mexican," which opened this past weekend, garnered strong support from the Hispanic community. The premise of the mockumentary is a novel one: California wakes up one morning to discover that every Hispanic in the state has simply vanished. But comic scenes of L.A. grappling with the disappearance of parking valets, dish washers, and a few of the Dodgers underline a serious message about the Latino contribution to America.

To market the movie, a series of billboards proclaimed "On May 14th There Will Be No Mexicans In California." Result: instant controversy. Bowing to pressure to remove one of the ads, the billboard company found itself all over the 6 o'clock news, generating the kind of publicity that reverberates from talk radio to op-ed columns. Latino TV stations, meanwhile, got behind the movie, even as 100,000 copies of a fake newspaper with stories about the missing were distributed to Hispanic schools, dry cleaners, and other outlets.

"To break through the clutter, you have to have a poignant message and you need to come up with something a little more shocking than [other films] because if not, you don't get noticed," says Rosio Prado Kissling, one of the owners of Latino World, which marketed "A Day Without a Mexican" to Hispanics.

The film, which opened on just 56 screens in southern California (as opposed to 3,411 for "Troy"), managed a stunning debut at No. 12 nationwide. In coming weeks "Mexican" will ripple out to screens across the country.

There was a time when even a movie such as "Star Wars" opened modestly and became a phenomenon only after a few weeks. In recent years, Hollywood largely has abandoned that model. Studios release their weapons of mass distraction on as many screens as possible to maximize returns before a competitor arrives next Friday.

But those "event" movies are aimed at a demographic that is more familiar with the voice of Mr. Moviefone than that of Bob Edwards. Independent films aimed at an older crowd, on the other hand, are risky because those viewers seldom rush out to see a movie the day it opens. If a low-budget flick is to have enough time to marinate and develop an audience, it's imperative that a core audience show up so that cinemas don't dump the film. And that doesn't always happen.

"Mickey" swung for the fences and missed, and "Bobby Jones" bogeyed. The marketing strategy is a gamble, says Mr. Dergarabedian. "Out of 400 movies a year, maybe 150 are from the majors and all the rest are small films. A lot of those are going to get hurt. They're not going to break out."

But, says "Bobby Jones" producer Rick Eldridge, the movie hasn't reached the 18th hole just yet. "We look at the theatrical [release] as really the way that we build an awareness and a market for the movie. Where we really make our money is going to be in the DVD."

The $16 million budget film had tried to lure a Christian audience by trumpeting its wholesome values and lead actor, Jim Caviezel of "The Passion of the Christ." Clearly, the success of "The Passion" has many filmmakers eyeing Christians as a potential core audience. Mel Gibson screened his film early to church groups and solicited support from religious leaders in a live teleconference broadcast. Soon, galvanized churches were buying whole blocks of tickets for the film, which has earned $368 million to date.

Excel films, a Utah-based company that produces family friendly movies with a moral message, believes their August World War II drama "Saints and Soldiers" could appeal to a "faith-based" audience. But Excel CEO Jeff Simpson stresses that the indie film doesn't have an overtly religious message and could have a broader appeal.

Thinkfilm, meanwhile, is marketing "Festival Express" to another fervent group: Deadheads. Clips of the film, about a festival featuring The Grateful Dead, the Band, and Janis Joplin that traveled across Canada by train in 1970, are being shown on video monitors at concerts for The Dead.

"That's what we have to do," says Urman. "The studios spend a lot of money. We do a lot of research. It's like electioneering. We go out, shake hands, we kiss babies, and every vote is $10 in the bank."

Graham Greene Biography, Heavy on Sex, Draws Some Outrage

2004-11-06T17:47:00.000-06:00

Graham Greene Biography, Heavy on Sex, Draws Some Outrage
By DINITIA SMITH

Published: November 4, 2004

Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times
Norman Sherry calls negative reviews of his biography "piffle."

The final volume of Norman Sherry's three-part, 2,251-page biography of Graham Greene was supposed to be the capstone of an obsessive 30-year undertaking, one that would build on the widespread critical success of the first two volumes and take full measure of the man and his achievements.

Instead, members of Greene's family are furious that Mr. Sherry - who had exclusive access to many of the author's papers - chose to highlight Greene's fondness for prostitutes and his sordid sexual pursuits. The new volume has received widespread praise in the United States, but critics in England have condemned its unconventional style and are livid. Mr. Sherry has interjected himself into the narrative, dropped in bits of his own poetry, even included a picture of himself riding on a donkey in Mexico as he retraced Greene's research for the novel "The Power and the Glory."

Volume III of "The Life of Graham Greene,'' published in the United States last month by Viking, covers the last years of the life of the author of "Brighton Rock," "The Heart of the Matter," "The Quiet American" and many other novels. It describes Greene's life as a British agent, his travels through Cuba and Congo, his friendships with Hemingway, Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. But it also portrays a darker side of Greene, who once wrote a list of 47 prostitutes with whom he had had sex, along with coded details of the encounters.

"This book is not about Graham Greene, but about Sherry," Greene's son and literary executor, Francis, 67, said in a recent telephone interview from his home in the south of England.

"His obsession with brothels far surpasses that of his supposed subject," Mr. Greene, a retired documentary filmmaker, wrote in a separate e-mail message. He particularly objected to the "egregious" portrayal of his mother, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, to whom Greene, a Roman Catholic, remained married even while having a succession of mistresses. Greene's daughter, Lucy Caroline, who lives in Switzerland, was unavailable for comment.

Greene's niece, Amanda Saunders, who was her uncle's assistant, called the book "a deeply embarrassing biography because it's so poorly written, poorly researched."

"It's a total misrepresentation," she added.

Though the book received some highly favorable reviews in the United States, it was savaged by many British critics. The Spectator of London found it a "truly appalling" work. The Observer derided the book's "flights of vulgar hagiography."

"Sherry indulges in some truly awful writing," the reviewer wrote, quoting a passage about Greene's death: " 'Worms breed, and the handsome man with stunning blue eyes is host to a thousand sliding lascivious creatures, eating our flesh, turning us gradually into a sort of human jam.' ''

In a recent interview during a visit to New York, Mr. Sherry, an Englishman who is a literature professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, dismissed the British reviews as "poppycock, piffle, balderdash."

As for bringing himself into the biography, Mr. Sherry said, "Especially when Greene died, I was very moved by his death, so inevitably I had to put myself into it."

"I often felt I must be him," Mr. Sherry continued. "I lived within him."

The men met in 1974. Mr. Sherry said Greene had admired the thoroughness of his biography of Joseph Conrad, and at London's Savile Club asked him to write his own. The author gave Mr. Sherry unfettered access to his papers, diaries and correspondence, including his passionate letters to Catherine Walston, a mistress who was the basis for the character of Sarah in "The End of the Affair."

"He told his friends they could speak to me but to no one else," said Mr. Sherry, 69, a small, intense man who speaks in a rush of words. "He said he would never lie to me, but there were some questions he might not answer."

As for the sexual content of the biography, "He told me to be honest," Mr. Sherry said. "The last thing he said to me was: 'The truth, Norman. Else I shall haunt you!' ''

"You can't allow the family to dictate to you what you write," he continued. "If you are going to write about a man who is highly sexed, you can't change that."

Besides, Mr. Sherry said, "you can't help but admire him for having sex with everything in sight."

In his attempt to research every aspect of his subject's life, Mr. Sherry said, he ruined his health and alienated his family. He is twice divorced.

Mr. Sherry said he got tropical diabetes in Liberia while recreating Greene's research for "Journey Without Maps." He caught dysentery in Mexico following Greene's path in "The Power and the Glory." He risked getting shot in Haiti, where Greene set the anti-Duvalier novel "Comedians," because he carried a copy of the book with him. While researching Greene's writing of "The Honorary Consul" in Paraguay, he developed intestinal gangrene.

"I almost destroyed myself," he said. "By the time I had finished, my life had been taken from me."

In contrast to the British reviews, the critical reception in the United States has been largely positive. Paul Theroux wrote in The New York Times Book Review that the biography was "incomparable; as an intellectual and political history of the 20th century it is invaluable." He called it "masterly," and Publishers Weekly called it "magnificent."

Mr. Sherry blamed Greene's relatives for the bad reviews in Britain. "I think the family got in touch with them," he said, though he added, "I can't prove that."

Greene's family has also faulted Mr. Sherry for factual errors, including his belittling of Greene's relationship with Yvonne Cloetta, his last mistress, of more than 30 years, and the emphasizing of his love for Catherine Walston. (Like many of his mistresses, both lived with their husbands while involved with Greene.) They say Mr. Sherry implies that Greene loved Cloetta because she wasn't an intellectual challenge to him.

"She was an important part of Graham's life," Ms. Saunders said. Cloetta herself was disappointed at the emphasis on Greene's sex life in the first two volumes. Before she died in 2001, she wrote Mr. Sherry, "You have betrayed Graham and you have betrayed your craft."

A major source of contention among the family, scholars and Mr. Sherry is a note Greene wrote to Mr. Sherry in 1991, while on his deathbed: "I, Graham Greene grant permission to Norman Sherry, my Authorized Biographer, excluding any other, to quote from my copyright material published or unpublished."

Mr. Sherry interpreted the note as giving him sole access to Greene's archives. Greene's family and other scholars disagreed. They contended that the comma between "other" and "to" meant that people not actually writing biographies of Greene could have access to the papers. The Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, for one, interpreted Greene's wishes to be that part of its collection was embargoed to all but Mr. Sherry. But other libraries, including the Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, allowed scholars into their collections.

Family members were furious, however, that scholars were still being kept out of some of Greene's archives. "There is absolutely no question of the fact that Graham intended for his archives to be available," said Louise Dennys, a niece of Greene who has published and edited some of her uncle's books, including his autobiography, "Ways of Escape."

One scholar affected by the embargo was Richard Greene (no relation), a professor at the University of Toronto at Mississauga and editor of "The Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell," who was seeking access to Sitwell's correspondence with Greene at Georgetown. Graham Greene's papers are now open to all scholars. Richard Greene is editing a new book, Greene's own correspondence, "A Life in Letters."

"It seems to be the overwhelming opinion at the end of the day that the three-volume biography hasn't succeeded," he said.

Mr. Greene said the heart of the problem was Mr. Sherry's overidentification with his subject. He cited the passages about Greene's death.

"His account of Greene's relationship to his son, Francis, isn't much more than a paragraph," Mr. Greene said. "He's erased the actual son and inserted himself as filial."

Greene has been depicted as a neglectful father. Mr. Sherry recalled the author as saying: " 'I know my son doesn't much like me. He'll try to correct you. And it's my job to protect my chosen biographer.' ''

Mr. Sherry said, "I was the nearest thing to being a son to him as could possibly be."

As for the comma, Mr. Sherry said, "I simply went by what Graham said in the letter."

"The damn comma," he said. "It has nothing to do with me."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/books/04gree.html?8br

French viewers get a gay TV channel

2004-11-03T21:26:00.000-06:00

French viewers get a gay TV channel

Amelia Gentleman in Paris
Tuesday October 26, 2004
The Guardian

"A giant leap for television, a small step in high heels," the presenter promised, unveiling France's first gay television station which aims to make gay culture mainstream and marks a new climate of tolerance in Roman Catholic France.

Pink TV, which launched last night, promises viewers a mixture of Wonder Woman repeats, prime-time opera and gay and lesbian porn. A daily cultural review will look at issues like tourism, health, poetry and clubbing from a gay perspective, in a style which aims to be "more cosy than cheeky".

Supported by France's three main commercial television networks, the cable and satellite channel benefits from a relatively new atmosphere of openness towards homosexuality in France.

Pascal Houzelot, the station's founder and president, said the country was ready for the channel: "Pink is coming at the right moment. There's been a real change in mentality. We've seen society change, we've seen the law change ... Gays in France have gone from the era of tolerance to the era of legality, which simply means equality." The channel's creation has been met with enthusiasm in the French press.

Gay rights have been hovering at the top of the French political agenda for months. The government is pushing through legislation which allows anyone found guilty of making a homophobic remark to be punished.

Same-sex couples are recognised legally, and the fact that Paris has a gay mayor is now barely even remarked upon. However, anti-gay feeling remains; SOS Homophobia recorded a doubling on attacks on gays in 2003, with 86 reported cases, against 41 in 2002.
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The government is firmly opposed to attempts to legalise same-sex marriages and adoption by gay or lesbian couples. But Pink TV's backers are keen to stress it will not be a ghetto station, nor particularly militant in tone.

Its target audience will be among France's 3.5 million gay and lesbian population, (between 7 and 8% of the total, according to the channel's figures). But for commercial reasons, Pink TV hopes to attract a large number of straight viewers to pay the €9 (£6) monthly subscription fee, too.

Sport will be presented by a transgender newsreader in a mini-skirt, who admits to a fondness for obscure sports like underwater hockey. But the station also offers Japanese manga cartoons, documentaries on subjects like being gay in Africa, and debates and interviews presented by one of the nation's most popular broadcasters, Claire Chazal.

Pink TV will be retransmitting old episodes of Channel 4's So Graham Norton, as well as the series Queer as Folk, Tipping the Velvet and French and Saunders.

The station's financial backers hope advertisers will be eager to cash in on the power of the pink pound, but it is not clear whether their optimism is well-founded.

Libération reported yesterday that there was a shyness by large advertisers to come forward. The only two comparable channels, Italy's Gay TV which launched in 2002 and Pridevision, established in Canada in 2001, are both struggling.

Mr Houzelot believes the presence of porn films broadcast after midnight four times a week will help make things work commercially.

"Porn on Pink is editorially the right decision and economically necessary," he said, estimating that of the 180,000-odd anticipated subscribers, some 100,000 will come for the porn.

POV, Cool Films get 'Wild' hair, form new video venture

2004-11-03T21:25:00.000-06:00

INDUSTRY WRAPUPS
From the October 29, 2004 print edition
Media & Marketing Beat
POV, Cool Films get 'Wild' hair, form new video venture
Christine Hall
Houston Business Journal

Local production companies POV Editing and Visual Effects and Cool Films have merged to form a new venture called Wild Blue Pictures, a full-service film and video operation.

"Both companies add to the equation," says David Henry, president of Wild Blue. "As one unit, we also add depth to areas that the separate companies formerly only dabbled in."

Henry says the merger was an answer to the question of how to stay ahead in a city full of competitors.

W. Ross Wells, Wild Blue Pictures' senior director and editor, worked with Bill Moore, former head of POV, in the early 1990s. Moore is now post-production chief for the new firm.

Prior to the formation of the new company, POV had seven employees and Cool Films had five. No employees were lost during that time.

"Our old companies had a great run -- both more than 10 years," Moore says. "We all felt it was time for something new. Ad agencies are emerging from their long economic slump, and corporations are spending money on high-end communications again."

After considering the business model, Moore says it was a natural move to form a new company.

"Our industry has become increasingly fragmented and competitive, and so in the big picture, consolidation made sense," he says. "In this specific case, we had so much in common -- dedication to the craft, a belief in people over machines, a flat structure -- we just decided to go for it."

Wild Blue offers film and video production for broadcast advertisers, corporate communications, feature film, high definition and video production, five editorial suites, sound design, motion graphics and animation, a "Flame" visual effects suite and a 35-mm projection room.

The company occupies the space formerly held by POV on Old Katy Road.

Trembling Before G-d

2004-11-03T21:22:00.000-06:00

2001 - France/USA/Israel - Gender Issues/Religions & Belief Systems/Social Issues
Reviewed by Elvis Mitchell

Type:
Documentary
Distributor:
Turbulent Arts
REVIEW SUMMARY
Directed by Sandi Simcha DuBowski. (NR, 84 minutes).

With"Trembling Before G-d," the director Sandi Simcha DuBowski latches on toa provocative subject and invests it with a compelling tenderness. This documentaryis essentially about merging the Old World and the New, but with a twistthat is shocking: it concerns the heartfelt desire of homosexuals to finda place for themselves in Orthodox Judaism, where they are shunned and repudiated.The film tells several stories, profiling a number of people. Mr. DuBowskiknows that the film would shatter if his viewpoint were rendered in hystericalterms or even condescending ones. The film is more interested in dealingwith the intrinsic drama in these situations, like that of the gay Jews whodecide to divorce themselves from their faith with the same forcefulnessused against them. – Elvis Mitchell , The New York Times

MPAA Rating: NR (Adult Situations)
Review

Trembling Before G-d

November 2, 2004
Act of Faith: A Film on Gays and Islam
By MATTHEW HAYS

Documentaryfilmmakers have long wrestled with the need to obscure the identities ofgays and lesbians in their work, to avoid unpleasant consequences like jobloss or a falling out with family. Parvez Sharma, a New York-based director,has been worried that much worse could await the Muslim homosexuals profiledin his upcoming "In the Name of Allah," if ever they were identified.

Forsome, imprisonment or torture is a possibility, Mr. Sharma said. Indeed,one of Mr. Sharma's associate producers, a gay Egyptian man, will not belisted in the credits at his own request because of the perceived risk.

Andthreats to the director have become routine. "About every two weeks I getan e-mail that berates me, condemns me to hell and, if they are nice, asksme to still seek forgiveness while there is still time," Mr. Sharma said,speaking here about his as yet unfinished film, which he is preparing totake on the festival circuit in faraway 2006.

That such pressure isbuilding around a project still more than a year from completion is the bestmeasure of a perhaps widening gulf that separates an increasingly open attitudetoward gay and lesbian life in many Western countries from that of predominantlyMuslim ones.

With backing primarily from European television broadcasters,including Channel 4 in Britain, Arte in France and ZDF in Germany, Mr. Sharmaset out nearly two years ago to examine how homosexual Muslims around theworld reconciled their faith with their sexual orientation.

In doingso, the director received advice and moral support from his producer, SandiSimcha DuBowski, the filmmaker behind "Trembling Before G-d," a feature-lengthdocumentary that two years ago investigated the lives of Orthodox and HasidicJews who are also gay or lesbian.

"Parvez's film is extremely important,"Mr. DuBowski said. "It challenges the idea that there are no Muslim gaysor lesbians. It poses much the same question that 'Trembling Before G-d'did: why would gays want to be part of a tradition that rejects them?"

Mr.Sharma, who was born and brought up in India, said the inspiration for hisfilm came from his own experiences as a gay Muslim. His curiosity about howIslam and homosexuality intersect grew when he attended American Universityin Washington, where he received a master's degree in film and video.

Listeningto stories told by gay Muslims at the school, Mr. Sharma conceived the ideaof a picture that would "give voice to a community that really needed tobe heard and that until now hadn't been; it was about going where the silencewas strongest."

Mr. Sharma has conducted interviews throughout NorthAmerica, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, in countries like Afghanistan,Pakistan, India and Egypt. Many of the people he interviewed were found throughthe Internet.

"I received thousands of e-mails shortly after wordgot out about the film,'' Mr. Sharma said. "One 17-year-old Egyptian is remarkablybrave, quite open about his sexual orientation despite that country's crackdownon homosexuals."

As with Christianity and Judaism, there is a broadrange of expert opinion on the exact nature of Islam's official stance towardhomosexuality. Some scholars interpret the Koran as suggesting that thereis no condemnation of homosexuality, while others read Muslim scripture asindicating homosexual acts should be punished with death.

Given thehostility toward homosexuality in some Islamic factions, Mr. Sharma has goneto great lengths to reassure many of his interview subjects that they willremain anonymous. But this obscuring of identities has led to what the directorregards as one of his key challenges: filming people in silhouette or withtheir faces covered tends to reinforce a sense of shame around homosexuality,precisely countering one of Mr. Sharma's main objectives.

"One youngAfghan woman I've interviewed, if her family found out about her being lesbianthey would undoubtedly kill her,'' Mr. Sharma said. "So it's unavoidable.In certain circumstances, I'm going to have to conceal faces. But I'd rathernot."

Still, nothing in that difficult process - including the threatsto himself - has destroyed Mr. Sharma's faith in the ability of Islam totolerate diversity.

"You have to understand," Mr. Sharma said, "thatIslam is a religion of more than a billion people, one more than 13 centuriesold, that has been hijacked by an extremely small and sometimes loud minority."

Galveston

2004-10-29T09:57:00.000-05:00

Galveston,
originally uploaded by Houston Filmmaker.

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January 21, 2005 MOVIE REVIEW | 'HEAD-ON' Two Misplaced Souls Decide They Might as Well Live By MANOHLA DARGIS

Jan. 21, 2005, 11:09AM 'Sideways' puts vino in cinematic spotlight By MICHAEL LONSFORD Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Jan. 20, 2005, 6:26PM Fear and Trembling is light and intense By A.O. SCOTT New York Times

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Galveston

January 21, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW | 'HEAD-ON'
Two Misplaced Souls Decide They Might as Well Live
By MANOHLA DARGIS

Jan. 21, 2005, 11:09AM
'Sideways' puts vino in cinematic spotlight
By MICHAEL LONSFORD
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Jan. 20, 2005, 6:26PM
Fear and Trembling is light and intense
By A.O. SCOTT
New York Times

Jan. 21, 2005, 10:41AM
Video with SpongeBob alarms Christian group
Reuters News Service

January 21, 2005
Moving In on New York Laps
By MICHAEL BRICK

January 21, 2005
Clemens to Become Highest Paid Pitcher Ever
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

January 20, 2005
STATE OF THE ART
New Ways to Manage Your Photos
By DAVID POGUE

When Bloggers Make News
As Their Clout Increases,
Web Diarists Are Asking:
Just What Are the Rules?

By JESSICA MINTZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 21, 2005; Page B1